Skip to main content

UPI transactions rise 25%, cross Rs 1 trillion mark in December

The volume of UPI transactions for December stood at 620 million.Transactions via the unified payments interface (UPI), the country’s flagship payments platform, crossed a value of Rs 1 trillion in December, according to the data released by the National Payments Corporation of India. The value of UPI transactions in December stood at Rs 1.02 trillion, against Rs 82,232 crore in November — a rise of 25 per cent. The volume of UPI transactions for December stood at 620 million, a growth of 18 per cent over the previous month. The UPI transaction volume for November stood at 525 million. Mobile wallet transactions for the month of October stood at 368.45 million, with a value of Rs 18,786 crore. This was a rise of 25 per cent and 13.5 per cent, respectively, over the previous month.
According to the latest set of data released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), card transactions in the month of October saw a rise of 9 per cent in volume to 1.4 trillion and 12 per cent rise in value to over Rs 4 trillion. UPI has seen exponential growth during the year, with volume growing four times and value growing seven times in December 2018 over December 2017. The data for the other modes of transaction is available only till October. The government’s UPI app, Bharat Interface for Money or BHIM, saw transaction volume of 17.35 million and value of Rs 7,981.82 crore in December. BHIM has seen a declining share in UPI transactions, with competition from private players.
UPI transactions rise 25%, cross Rs 1 trillion mark in December In addition to local players like Paytm and PhonePe, global players like Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and WhatsApp Pay are also actively pushing UPI through cashbacks. Banks are also trying to increase their share of UPI transactions through various partnerships. A major chunk of UPI transactions currently are peer-to-peer transactions. The launch of UPI 2.0, which targets merchant payments, signals that the platform might see stronger growth.
“UPI is cost-efficient and asset-light, compared to other alternatives and, in most cases, it can be activated by the recipient (merchant or business) on a self-serve model. It is indeed a much-needed feature added to a platform,” said Mahesh Makhija, leader-digital & emerging technology, EY India. According to Kalpesh J Mehta, partner, Deloitte India, the biggest disruptor among the new UPI 2.0 features is the one-time mandate feature. “It can make the payment experience much more seamless, and at the same time give greater control to the customer. It can enable multiple use cases, which can help proliferate its adoption,” he added. The RBI has also announced that wallets would soon be interoperable through UPI, which is expected to greatly boost UPI and digital payments as a whole. According to NITI Aayog, India’ payments space has the growth potential of becoming a trillion-dollar industry in next five years.

The Business Standard, 02nd January 2019

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Household debt up, but India still lags emerging-market economies: RBI

  Although household debt in India is rising, driven by increased borrowing from the financial sector, it remains lower than in other emerging-market economies (EMEs), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in its Financial Stability Report. It added that non-housing retail loans, largely taken for consumption, accounted for 55 per cent of total household debt.As of December 2024, India’s household debt-to-gross domestic product ratio stood at 41.9 per cent. “...Non-housing retail loans, which are mostly used for consumption purposes, formed 54.9 per cent of total household debt as of March 2025 and 25.7 per cent of disposable income as of March 2024. Moreover, the share of these loans has been growing consistently over the years, and their growth has outpaced that of both housing loans and agriculture and business loans,” the RBI said in its report.Housing loans, by contrast, made up 29 per cent of household debt, and their growth has remained steady. However, disaggregated data sho...

External spillovers likely to hit India's financial system: RBI report

  While India’s growth remains insulated from global headwinds mainly due to buoyant domestic demand, the domestic financial system could, however, be impacted by external spillovers, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in its half yearly Financial Stability Report published on Monday.Furthermore, the rising global trade disputes and intensifying geopolitical hostilities could negatively impact the domestic growth outlook and reduce the demand for bank credit, which has decelerated sharply. “Moreover, it could also lead to increased risk aversion among investors and further corrections in domestic equity markets, which despite the recent correction, remain at the high end of their historical range,” the report said.It noted that there is some build-up of stress, primarily in financial markets, on account of global spillovers, which is reflected in the marginal rise in the financial system stress indicator, an indicator of the stress level in the financial system, compared to its p...

Retail inflation cools to a six-year low of 2.82% in May on moderating food prices

  New Delhi: Retail inflation in India cooled to its lowest level in over six years in May, helped by a sharp moderation in food prices, according to provisional government data released Thursday.Consumer Price Index (CPI)-based inflation eased to 2.82% year-on-year, down from 3.16% in April and 4.8% in May last year, data from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) showed. This marks the fourth consecutive month of sub-4% inflation, the longest such streak in at least five years.The data comes just days after the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Monetary Policy Committee cut the repo rate by 50 basis points to 5.5%, its third straight cut and a cumulative reduction of 100 basis points since the easing cycle began in February. The move signals a possible pivot from inflation control to supporting growth.Food inflation came in at just 0.99% in May, down from 1.78% in April and a sharp decline from 8.69% a year ago.A Mint poll of 15 economists had projected CPI ...