UPI, a four-year-old payment infrastructure built by India’s largest banks, surpassed 2 billion transactions last month, exactly a year after hitting the 1 billion monthly transactions milestone.
Driving the transactions for UPI — which has become the foremost popular digital payment method in India because of its open architecture that permits interoperability among all participating payments apps — are Walmart’s PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, and Amazon Pay.
“Unlike China, we’ve given equal opportunities to both small and enormous domestic and foreign companies,” said Dilip Asbe, chief executive of NPCI, the payments body behind UPI, in an earlier interview.
The 2.07 billion UPI transactions in October processed $51.9 billion in value, up from $25.7 billion in October 2019. As has previously said that NPCI is getting to expand UPI outside of India.
For the primary time in additional than a year, Google Pay didn’t drive the foremost volume of UPI transactions. PhonePe recorded 835 million UPI transactions in October, it said, while Google Pay hit about 820 million, consistent with people conversant in the matter.
Paytm recorded about 245 million transactions, while Amazon Pay settled with about 125 million, the people said. In a statement, PhonePe confirmed that it assumed the “market-leading position” with quite 40% of the market share in UPI. Google didn’t immediately answer requests for comments.
A Paytm spokesperson told TechCrunch, “Paytm offers a variety of funding sources to its customers: Paytm UPI, Paytm Wallet, Paytm Payments checking account, open-end credit, Mastercard and net banking.
Overall, the transactions through these funding sources have grown over 20% within the month of October. Person-to-merchant (P2M) constitute over 70% of the entire transactions.”
TechCrunch couldn’t determine what percentage of unique monthly transacting users these payments firms have amassed within the country. In May, Google Pay had about 75 million transacting users, before 60 million of PhonePe and 30 million of Paytm.
Unlike Google Pay, both Paytm and PhonePe also operate a wallet service. The wallet service isn’t powered by UPI. PhonePe said overall it processed 925 million transactions (UPI + wallet) last month and had more than100 a million monthly active users.
PhonePe has recently seen a surge in its transactions as more offline shops open and merchants and consumers choose a digital alternative to finish transactions.
The app has also added a variety of financing services, including 600,000 insurance policies, it said. PhonePe has also benefited from Flipkart’s festival sale and therefore the growth of fantasy sports app Dream 11.
“We are on a mission to form digital payments how of life for each Indian citizen, and our next target is to cross 500 million registered users by Dec 2022. In line with our brand ethos of ‘Karte Ja. Badhte Ja,’ (Hindi for keep working and growing).
we still launch new and innovative products for each stratum of Indian society, also as enable digital payment acceptance across every merchant in every village and city in India,” said Sameer Nigam, chief executive and founding father of PhonePe, during a statement.
And things are close to getting tougher as more players are expected to hitch the race. WhatsApp, which has over 400 million users in India, started testing UPI payments on its app in 2018. It remains stuck during a regulatory maze, however, which has prevented it from rolling out WhatsApp Pay to most of its users within the country.
