The Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) UPI app saw transactions of 9.1 million for the month of December 2017, and transactions worth Rs 3,083.2 crore, actually declining when there was massive growth in UPI payments.
There were 145.5 million UPI transactions in December, with Rs 13,144 crore being transacted. Thus, BHIM processed only 6% of all UPI transactions and accounted for 23% of the amount transacted in December. Remember that BHIM has slightly increased month-on-month, and this is the period during which Google Tez has launched. We don’t have data for PhonePe, but give Google’s claim that Tez did 140 million transactions for the month of October and November, it’s likely that the battle is now between Tez and PhonePe, apart from the cashback transactions which Tez hasn’t accounted for.
In December 2017, Number of transactions using BHIM grew to 9.1 million, up 10% from 8.2 million last month, while amount transacted also increased to Rs 3,083 crore with a growth of 21%, according to data provided by the National Payments Corporation of India. The NPCI is the bank-owned organization that runs the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). UPI doesn’t allow wallets, in order to give banks a competitive advantage.
Currently, BHIM is live on 65 banks and has seen over 22 million app downloads. However, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which developed BHIM, does not give information on the number of virtual payment addresses (VPAs) created and the number of accounts linked to the UPI.
In terms of net additions, the number of transactions for BHIM grew by 0.85 million in December 2017 while the total amount transacted was up by Rs 529.8 crore. In the previous month (November 2017), the number of transactions added over a half million, and the amount transacted had grown by Rs 204.8 crore.
With a little growth in the number of transactions, the average amount per transaction for BHIM has been on the increase. In December 2017, the average amount per transaction was Rs 3,400.
