Union Bank and SBI see highest UPI transaction failures in December

Union Bank of India and State Bank of India or SBI are among the top remitter banks to face a surge in failure in transactions for UPI in December, data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shows.

According to the data, the Union Bank of India recorded the highest rate of technical decline at 10.75% in December followed by SBI with 8.96%. This is the highest rate of technical decline for both banks in 2020. In the previous month, SBI had recorded a 3.12% technical decline in UPI transactions whereas Union Bank had 4.8%.

According to NPCI, technical decline is transaction declined due to technical reasons such as unavailability of systems and network issues on bank or NPCI side.

It’s worth noting that SBI had processed 641.62 million transactions via UPI in December as compared to 607.92 million in the previous month. The public sector bank also recorded a two-fold jump in total debit reversal count to 11.95 million in November to 23.27 million in December with a success rate of 80%. The debit reversal success rate indicates the percentage of total cases where a customer account may be debited and their bank is unable to confirm instantly about the status of reversal of such a debit. 

Besides processing UPI transactions through its own apps, SBI also handles a large chunk of transactions for Google Pay, the market leader in the UPI ecosystem.

Union Bank had only processed 80.60 million transactions via UPI in December with a total debit reversal of 3.90 million and debit reversal success rate of 33.69%.

To recall, UPI had recorded a total transaction of 2.23 billion amounting to Rs 4,16,176.21 crore or Rs 4.16 trillion in December 2020. During the period, the peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions stood at 1,283.71 million valuing to Rs 3,48,006.06 crore whereas peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions recorded at 950.45 million amounting to Rs 68,170.15 crore.