UPI sets a new record with 1.49 Bn transactions worth Rs 2.9 Tn in July

Unified Payments Interface or UPI has posted 1.49 billion transactions worth Rs 2,90,537 crore or Rs 2.9 trillion in July. As estimated, July brought the best result for the digital payments railroad since its inception.

As per data released by NPCI, an umbrella organisation for all retail payments systems in India, UPI has roughly recorded a 12% spurt in volume and 11% rise in value as compared to June. 

Besides UPI, NPCI’s real-time payment settlement system IMPS has also improved from processing 198 million transactions worth Rs 2,06,950 crore in June to 222 million transactions amounting to Rs 2,25,775 crore in July.

This is a good sign for the digital payments ecosystem in India, which was going through a rough patch due to Covid-19 induced lockdown. For the past couple of months, UPI has been in recovery mode, and the latest figure is the testament of anticipation by financial pundits tracking the UPI ecosystem.

In the meanwhile, NPCI is going through a series of new developments such as introducing recurring payments, onboarding more merchants on the platform via QR Code-base payments system and bringing MDR back.

Where recurring payments come with a new use case for monthly payments such as SIPs, EMI, subscriptions among others, QR Code payments will help it to bring in more merchants to push the peer-to-merchant payments system to a next level.

Of late, media reports suggested that NPCI is mulling to cap the market share of top UPI apps. If it comes into play, the move will check the monopolistic activities by controlling the market share of particular players such as Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm and Amazon Pay.

The quadruplet together controls over 95% market share in UPI.