PhonePe continues to lead with highest UPI transactions in November

Digital payments platforms PhonePe and Google Pay continue to lead the UPI ecosystem in November with PhonePe, the Walmart-owned company sustaining its lead of the past 11 months.

PhonePe has registered 1,911.21 million transactions in the last month amounting to Rs 3,65,044.32 crore followed by Google Pay’s 1,447.84 million worth Rs 2,83,357.99 crore, data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shows. 

PhonePe now has a 45.65% market share whereas Google Pay controls 34.58%. This is a slight decline in market share for PhonePe while Google Pay has managed to increase its share by a thin margin. 

In the previous month (October), PhonePe and Google Pay had a market share of 45.92% and 34.41% respectively.

UPI had recorded 4,186.48 million transactions worth Rs 7,68,436.11 crore in November. In the top five UPI apps, Paytm had registered 543.71 million transactions worth Rs 66,920.55 crore in the last month followed by Amazon Pay and ICICI Bank Apps with  71.04 million and 25.74 million transactions respectively. 

WhatsApp, which was recently allowed to onboard 40 million users to use its UPI payments feature, registered only 2.60 million transactions amounting Rs 104.19 crore. The Facebook-owned [now Meta] company couldn’t manage to grab significant volume since its entry into the UPI race.

The volume and value-wise market share of the top five UPI-enabled apps can be seen below:

In terms of average transaction value, Google Pay had Rs 1,957 as compared to PhonePe’s Rs 1,910. Paytm and Amazon Pay had an average transaction value of Rs 1,231 and Rs 850 respectively.

ICICI Bank apps have recorded an average transaction value of Rs 2,738. Overall, UPI recorded an average transaction value of Rs 1,835.

PhonePe had crossed Google Pay’s volume to become the numero uno app in the UPI ecosystem in December last year. According to PhonePe, 80% of its transactions come from tier II, tier III and beyond cities.

The company also claimed that it is the leader in NPCI’s Bharat Bill Pay (BBPS) transactions. BBPS enables customers to set up recurring payments for electricity, gas, DTH, insurance, loan repayments, FASTag recharge, among others.

Paytm, on the other side, said that it’s not focused on UPI alone and the public company claimed that it saw 52% growth in non-UPI payment volumes.

While NPCI’s rule to cap the market share of any third party UPI apps to 30% is yet to be implemented, RBI has announced plans to launch digital payment systems for feature phones. With this, the apex banking body will allow an internet-free UPI payments system for feature phone users soon.