PhonePe’s UPI market share rises to 45% in April; Google Pay slips a tad

Digital payments firm PhonePe has further increased its lead over Google Pay in terms of market share in Unified Payments Interface or UPI in April, data released by the National Payments Corporation of India or NPCI shows. 

While PhonePe has increased its market share from 43.91% in March to 45% in April, Google Pay’s market share during the period recorded a marginal decline from 35% to 34.3%, data shows.

The home-grown company backed by Flipkart has recorded 1189.89 million transactions worth Rs 234,023.33 crore whereas Google Pay registered 905.96 million transactions worth Rs 190,106.71 crore.

UPI had recorded 2.64 billion or 264 crore transactions worth Rs 4,93,663 crore in April.

The market share of Paytm Payments Bank stood at 12.14% in the last month with 320.78 million transactions amounting to Rs 36,859.2 crore. 

In the top five UPI apps, Amazon Pay and Yes Bank Apps were at the 4th and 5th spot with 1.85% and 0.86% market share respectively. Government-promoted BHIM had a 0.84% market share, however, its total value of transactions was far ahead of Yes Bank Apps.

WhatsApp, which was allowed by NPCI to roll out the UPI payments feature for 20 million users in November 2020, has not been able to gain traction in the last six months. The Facebook-owned instant messaging app recorded a mere 0.54 million transactions worth Rs 47.62 crore in April and couldn't surpass even 1 million volume since November.

Since the inception of UPI in 2016, only three apps - PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm - have been dominating the top list and no other players have been able to challenge them. According to the NPCI data, their collective market share in April was 91.5%.

While NPCI has released a guideline to cap the market share of third-party apps to 30% from January 1 of 2021, Google Pay and PhonePe may get an extension of six months or more to comply with the new rules.