PhonePe controls 44% market share in UPI network in March; G-Pay holds 35%

PhonePe continues to dominate the Unified Payments Interface or UPI ecosystem since December last year. With a 43.91% market share, the company has left Google Pay behind with a decent gap of 9% in March.

PhonePe has processed 1,199.51 million transactions worth Rs 2,31,412.33 crore through UPI in March followed by Google Pay’s 957.01 million transactions worth Rs 2,01,185.14 crore, data released by NPCI shows. The market share of Google Pay was 35% in the last month.

Overall, UPI had registered 2731.68 million transactions worth Rs 5,04,886 crore or Rs 5.04 trillion in March.

This is also the first time when a single UPI-enabled payments app has crossed the 1 billion volume mark since the inception of UPI in 2016. In February, PhonePe had registered  975.53 million transactions worth Rs 1,89,517.82 crore whereas Google Pay processed 827.86 million transactions amounting to Rs 1,74,455.33 crore.

Paytm, the third distant player in UPI, has recorded  344.99 million transactions worth Rs 38,653.06 crore in the last month.

While Google Pay predominantly competes with PhonePe and Paytm in UPI, the two home-grown companies have also built a network of other payment instruments including wallet, card payments and net banking. In March, PhonePe claimed to have recorded 1.3 billion transactions across its payments methods whereas Paytm said that it had crossed 1.4 billion transactions.

Last month, NPCI had released standard operating procedures or SOPs for all third party apps which said that the umbrella entity will alert the payment platforms in case their app reaches the threshold of 30%. NPCI’s cap is effective from January 1, 2021, however, existing players like Google Pay and PhonePe will get an extension of six months or more to comply with the new rules.