UPI records over Rs 5 lakh crore worth transactions in March

Unified Payments Interface or UPI registered 2.73 billion transactions worth Rs 5,04,886 crore or Rs 5.04 trillion in March, reflecting a two-fold surge in UPI transaction volume and value as compared to March last year.

In February, UPI recorded 2.29 billion transactions worth Rs 4,25,062 crore in which PhonePe alone accounted for 42.5% market share with 975.53 million transactions. During the month, the Bengaluru-based firm stood at the first position in terms of processing volume as well as value followed by Google Pay, which registered 827.86 million transactions.

A tweet shared by NPCI shared the latest numbers and the UPI apps’ market share statistics for March are yet to be released. 

During the last month, PhonePe claims to have crossed 1 billion transactions through UPI. “We crossed a billion UPI transactions in March. The total transactions in March across payment instruments wallet, card and UPI  was recorded at 1.3 billion. Our annual TPV run-rate in March was $388 billion,” said a PhonePe’s spokesperson.

A Paytm spokesperson said that the company recorded 1.4 billion transactions in March across all payment methods including Paytm wallet, UPI, cards and net-banking.

While the top two players in the UPI ecosystem control close to 80% market share, NPCI is mulling to cap the transactions of these platforms to 30% of total transaction volume. This essentially means that popular apps such as Google Pay and PhonePe and Paytm will not be permitted to process more than 30% of transactions via the UPI network. 

NPCI had recently 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%.

As of February 2021, PhonePe has a 42.5% market share in UPI followed by Google Pay’s 36.11%. Paytm, Axis Bank and Amazon Pay control 14.86%, 2.82% and 1.93% respectively.

While the NPCI’s cap is effective from January 1, 2021, existing players like Google Pay and PhonePe will get an extension of six months or more to comply with the new rules.