BalrajUnified Payment Interface aka UPI transactions fell 0.71 percent in November after reaching new highs in October, owing to positive perception during festivals and e-commerce sales.
Courtesy: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg
The instant real-time payment system recorded 418 crore transactions in November, down from 421 crores in October. Transaction volumes fell by 0.4 percent to Rs 7.68 lakh crore, down from Rs 7.71 lakh crore the last month.
UPI’s five-month motion of uninterrupted month-on-month growth has faded away. The most recent decline happened in May 2021, during the second wave of Covid-19. Despite the plunge, the month’s transaction values remain greater than the record $100 billion (~Rs 7.49 lakh crore) threshold attained by the payments system for the first time last month.
PhonePe dominated the UPI figures in November 2021, with 193 crore transactions accounting for Rs 3.65 lakh crore. Google Pay retained its second-place position with 145 million transactions totaling Rs 2.87 lakh crore. Next in rank were Paytm (632 million transactions worth Rs 80,508 crores); Amazon Pay (68.82 million transactions worth Rs 6,286 crores); and WhatsApp Pay (68.82 million transactions worth Rs 6,286 crores) (2.6 million transactions worth Rs 104 crores).
UPI has handled almost 34 billion transactions worth Rs 65.39 trillion so far this calendar year. It has also completed about 27 billion transactions so far this fiscal year, exceeding the volume processed in FY21. The platform handled roughly 22 billion transactions in FY21. The CEO of the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) stated that the target for the current financial year (FY22) is to reach 40-42 billion transactions. NPCI is the country’s umbrella organization for retail electronic payments.
Even after the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic have declined, contactless digital payments including mobile wallets and UPI continue to gain mainstream adoption. In comparison to the same period in 2021, UPI transactions amounted to 221 crore totaling Rs 3.90 Lakh crore.
Immediate Payments Service (IMPS), another popular payment channel, logs 412 million transactions in November, totaling Rs 3.64 trillion, down 4 percent in volume and 1.64 percent in value. In October, it processed 430.67 million transactions totaling Rs 3.70 trillion, an all-time high in terms of value and volume of transactions. FASTag registered 214.13 million transactions totaling Rs 3,177 crore in toll collection. The platform processed 214.23 million transactions worth Rs 3,356.74 crore in October.
In India, the digital payments market is estimated to reach Rs 7,092 trillion by 2025. However, the current 160 million unique mobile payment users are expected to grow fivefold by 2025, reaching nearly 800 million.