PhonePe dominates UPI ecosystem with 49% market share in April

Digital payments platform PhonePe has continued to be the number one player in the unified payments interface (UPI) ecosystem with a market share of close to 49% in April 2024 across P2M (person to merchant) and P2P (person to person) transactions.

PhonePe has maintained the leadership position in the overall UPI transactions for more than 40 months (since November 2020).

As per the data issued by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), PhonePe clocked 6.5 billion transactions via UPI out of the total transactions of 13.3 billion in the last month. This roughly translates to 48.87% market share in the UPI ecosystem which also includes players like Google Pay and Paytm, among many others.

UPI transactions declined in volume in April by 1% to 13.3 billion from 13.44 billion in March. The total transaction value in the same period also fell 0.7% to Rs 19.64 trillion from Rs 19.78 trillion in March.

While PhonePe and Google Pay registered 6.5 billion and 5 billion transactions respectively in March as well as in April, Paytm’s transactions slipped to 1.11 billion from 1.21 billion during the last two months. As of April, Google Pay and Paytm controlled 37.5% and 8.3% market share in the overall (P2M and P2P transactions) UPI ecosystem.

Value wise, PhonePe had close to 51% market share followed by Google Pay and Paytm with 35% and 5% share respectively.

For Paytm, this is the third consecutive decline in terms of monthly transactions in 2024. The trend can be seen below:

In January, RBI had imposed restrictions on Paytm due to compliance concerns. This appears to be the primary reason behind the fall in UPI transactions for the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led fintech major. The firm also saw a sharp fall in active users after January this year. Entrackr exclusively reported the development in April.

Paytm later received permission from NPCI to participate in  UPI through the third-party application provider (TPAP) under the multibank model.

In April, CRED became the fourth largest UPI-enabled app which processed 138 million transactions. This was followed by Amazon Pay and Fampay with 64.33 and 46.64 million transactions, respectively. Government- promoted BHIM recorded 25 million transactions while WhatsApp reported over 34 million transactions in the last month.

Significantly, NPCI is reportedly planning to review its decision to implement a 30% cap on the market share of UPI apps by the end of 2024.