UPI records 2.29 Bn transactions in February

Unified Payments Interface or UPI has registered 2.29 billion transactions worth Rs 4,25,062 crore in February, according to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India.

In terms of average transaction value, UPI has been able to maintain its previous record even in 28 days of February. In January, it had recorded 2.3 billion transactions worth Rs 4,31,181 crore or Rs 4.31 trillion.

While NPCI has not released the transactions break-up figures for February, digital payments major PhonePe had a lead over Google Pay in terms of UPI transactions volume and value by a decent margin in January. The Sameer Nigam-led firm had recorded 968.72 million transactions worth Rs 1,91,973.77 crore in January whereas Google Pay had registered 853.53 million transactions amounting to Rs 1,77,791.47 crore during the month.

Paytm, which has shifted its focus to its ecosystem of combined wallet and payments bank, recorded 281.18 million transactions worth Rs 33,909.50 crore in January. The Noida-based company said in a statement that it recorded 1.2 billion transactions in February across its financial services such as wallet, UPI, cards and net-banking. 

Paytm also said that it has the highest market share in offline merchant payments with 15% M-o-M growth and that its business app has over 17 million merchants on the platform and over 8.5 million partners hold a bank account with Paytm Payments Bank.

In terms of merchants payments, Paytm closely competes with PhonePe.

Responding to Entrackr’s queries a PhonePe spokesperson said that the company had crossed a billion transactions in December itself. “Our February numbers are also over a billion with approximately 970 million UPI transactions, and wallet, credit and debit card contributing to the rest of the numbers. We have approximately 280 million registered users and over 110 million monthly active users,” the statement said.

According to the company, its merchant acceptance number across India is 17.5 million.

It’s worth noting that SBI, which processes the largest volume of transactions via UPI among all banks, had improved its performance in terms of technical decline rate in January. The public sector bank had registered only a 1.44% technical decline rate in January as compared to 8.96% in the previous month.

The UPI transaction failure rate for the month of February is yet to be published by NPCI.