PhonePe controls 42.5% UPI market share in February; G-Pay slips to 36%

Digital payments firm PhonePe has increased its UPI transactions lead over Google Pay in February. The Bengaluru-based company has recorded 975.53 million transactions worth Rs 1,89,517.82 crore whereas Google Pay registered 827.86 million transactions amounting to Rs 1,74,455.33 crore during the month, data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shows.

In January, PhonePe had registered  968.72 million transactions as compared to Google Pay’s 853.53 million.

UPI had recorded 2,292.9 million or 2.29 billion transactions worth Rs 4,25,062 crore in February in which PhonePe leads with 42.54% market share followed by Google Pay with 36% market share. In January, PhonePe and Google Pay’s market share were recorded at 42% and 37%, respectively.

Paytm, the third distant player, has recorded a small growth in terms of UPI transactions from 281.18 million transactions worth Rs 33,909.50 crore in January to 290.03 million worth Rs 34,405.44 crore in February.

From January 2021 onwards, NPCI has also included an ‘On-us Transactions’ column in which UPI transactions that are not processed and settled through the UPI Central System are shown. For Paytm, around 50 million UPI transactions amounting to Rs 4088.08 crore was recorded as On-us transactions in the last month. 

It’s worth noting that the On-us transactions figures are not included in the total number of transactions.

While Google Pay competes with PhonePe and Paytm on UPI transactions, the home-grown players take on each other on UPI, wallet and other utility transactions.

Recently, Paytm had claimed that it recorded 1.2 billion transactions in February across its financial services such as wallet, UPI, cards and net-banking. The company’s arch-rival PhonePe also said that it crossed 1.07 billion total transactions across UPI, cards and wallets during the month.

The duo are also locked in battle on the merchant front. PhonePe claims to have on-boarded 17.5 million merchants whereas Paytm has said that it has over 17 million merchants on its platform.

On Monday, Paytm Payments Bank announced that its @Paytm UPI handle has received approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India to enable payment mandates for IPO applications. As per the latest NPCI report, it registers the lowest technical decline rate of 0.02% as compared to all UPI remitter banks and 0.04% as compared to all UPI beneficiary banks.