Ever since the concept digital payments through your smartphone was introduced in India, the number of its users has only been increasing. According to official sources, UPI transactions has crossed $1 trillion USD (Rs. 83.45 lakh crores) for the fiscal year of 2021. This is a huge jump considering that total transactions amount to Rs. 41 lakh crores just the previous year.
UPI also known as Unified Payments Interface is a form of sending money instantly by linking your phone number and bank account to the app. UPI is a great way to send money not only to purchase products and receive services, but with the help of just a single touch you can send money to other people too. UPI has made its way into Indian mainstream culture. Just buy walking down the street of any Indian city, you can see the QR code for UPIs from the roadside tea shop to high end restaurants serving the finest dishes.
The main attraction of the UPI system is the convenience. In less than a minute you can send the required funds and the receiver gets notified immediately of the transaction. You can also send as little money from less than a rupee to a max which varies depending on the limit. In fact, over half of the transactions for the fiscal year of 2021, has been for amounts less than Rs. 200. Unfortunately, a massive number of constant transactions with low volume has caused servers to fail more often than one would like. 31.58 million payments failed in 2021, putting their failure rate at 2.5% which is pretty
With over 300 million users currently, the growth of UPI doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Considering the fact that UPI was created in 2016, by Raghuram Rajan and his RBI team in April of 2016 and then out commercially in July of the same year, the way it has been adopted by Indians is actually breath taking.
Currently, the next goal is to expand UPI to serve even feature phones. This would put the potential UPI users at over half a billion.
According to official estimates, within the next 5 years, UPI will be handling about a billion transactions daily. But for that to successfully happen, the apps shouldn’t be glitchy, work faster and shouldn’t have such a high fail rate.
Luckily, fate is on their side as ever since the start of the coronavirus people have been mostly avoiding real time modes of payment such as cash to keep themselves as safe as possible. As the world moved into the digital space, people had to get their groceries through e-commerce which paved the way for online payments and ever since the users of UPI has only grown.