New Delhi: Monthly transactions through the unified payments interface (UPI) crossed the 400-million mark for the first time in September, data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) showed today. 405.87million UPI transactions amounting to ₹ 59,835.36 crore were carried out during September—a 30% jump over 312.02 million transactions worth ₹ 54,212.26 crore in August.
Of the total UPI transactions in September, 16.33 million amounting to ₹ 7,064.86 crore took place on the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) platform.
However, it is not clear whether the data includes transactions with debit/credit in the same account for September. NPCI did not mention anything on its website regarding such transactions as it did while releasing figures for August.
In a move aimed at curbing fake transactions and regulate fintech companies from inflating their UPI transaction numbers, NPCI had asked banks to stop transactions from 1 August that originate from different UPI applications with the debit and the credit happening in the same account.
UPI transactions had for the first time crossed the 300-million mark in August for the first time.
The sharp rise in transactions over the last one month comes at a time when the Supreme Court has ruled that Aadhaar linkage with bank accounts is not mandatory.
In UPI, a user can send money to an individual using her Aadhaar number linked to the bank account. Other methods to send money via UPI includes a virtual payment address (VPA) and bank account details of the receiver.
The VPA resembles an email ID. For example, you can have a VPA as rishi21@axis or shruti@icici. You only give your merchant this address, which can store your payment details against this. They never even get to see your bank account number. It is very simple to create a VPA and even change it.
On 16 August, NPCI launched UPI 2.0, an upgraded version of UPI, with several new features, including an overdraft facility enabling customers to link their overdraft accounts with UPI.
UPI is a payments system launched by NPCI, the umbrella organization for all retail payments in India, that facilitates instant fund transfer between two bank accounts on a mobile platform, without requiring any details of the beneficiary’s bank account. Till now, there have been more than 31.6 million downloads of the BHIM app on the Android platform and around 1.63 million on the iOS platform.
UPI transactions received a major stimulus after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the BHIM app on 30 December 2016. In the last one year, the monthly UPI transaction volume has gone up by more than 2,000%, according to NPCI data.