UPI crosses 10 bn transactions second time in September

Chennai: With Unified Payments Interface (UPI) crossing 10 billion transactions for the second straight month, this seems to have become the new normal for the payment interface. In the coming months, banks are expected to grab higher market share of UPI.

UPI recorded 10.56 billion transactions worth Rs 15.8 lakh crore in September, according to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

While the transaction volume marginally increased from Rs 15.76 lakh crore in August to Rs 15.8 lakh crore in September, the number of transactions fell by a small margin from 10.58 billion to 10.56 billion in September.

UPI had crossed 1 billion monthly transactions for the first time in October of 2019.

As per the August data, PhonePe alone did close to nearly 5 billion (4,987 million) transactions, controlling 47 per cent market share in terms of volume, according to data sourced from NPCI. Google Pay and Paytm clocked 3.7 billion and 1.36 billion transactions, respectively. At the end of June quarter, these three UPI apps had an aggregate market share of 95.68 per cent. However, this could change in the coming months as banks become more active.

On April 6, the RBI announced that UPI will feature the availability of pre-sanctioned credit lines for its users. It is very likely that the users of this feature will be merchants or businesses because it will enable them to have instant credit for their business demands. This particular feature could also enable banks to have a great action in UPI which has been dominated by three players, said Worldline India.

UPI Lite transactions – higher limit and Near Field Communication – another new proposed feature is set to increase the limit of offline transactions (UPI Lite) from Rs 200 to Rs 500 as well as enable offline transactions using NFC technology. This means that customers can not only buy items for a higher amount, but they will now be able to do transactions on millions of devices (POS and SoftPOS) that have already been deployed in the market.