Union Bank sees highest UPI transaction failures in Jan; SBI’s performance improves

Union Bank of India has again become the top remitter banks to face a surge in failure in transactions for UPI, data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shows. 

The bank recorded the highest rate of technical decline at 12.89% in January and in December, its decline rate was recorded at 10.75%. Andhra Bank, which processed only 56.64 million transactions via UPI, saw its technical decline rate at 10.40%. Indian Bank was third on the list with a technical decline rate of 9.83%, data posted by NPCI shows. 

The technical decline or TD is transaction declined due to technical reasons such as unavailability of systems and network issues at the bank or with NPCI.

In terms of processing UPI transactions, State Bank of India or SBI has improved its performance by a decent margin. The public sector bank has registered only 1.44% technical decline rate in January as compared to 8.96% in the previous month.

It’s worth noting that SBI processes the largest volume of transactions via UPI among all banks. Besides processing UPI transactions through its own apps, it also handles a large portion of transactions for Google Pay, the second-largest market shareholder after PhonePe in the UPI ecosystem.

SBI had processed a total of 664.75 million transactions via UPI followed by HDFC, Axis Bank and ICICI Bank with 206.65 million, 173.38 million and 152.06 million transactions, respectively.

To recall, UPI had registered 2.3 billion transactions worth Rs 4,31,181 crore in January.

SBI also improved its total debit reversal success rate from 80% in December 2020 to 98.04% in January. 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. 

Like SBI, HDFC powers UPI transactions of third-party apps such as Google Pay, MobiKwik​ and WhatsApp. ICICI and Axis Bank handles UPI transactions for PhonePe, Google Pay and WhatsApp.