Bengaluru leads digital payments adoption among Indian cities in Q1 2019: Report

Bengaluru has emerged as the top city in the country in terms of adoption of digital payments while Maharashtra ranks at the top among all the states, according to a report released by Worldline on digital payments adoption for the March quarter of 2019.

Bengaluru is followed by Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, and Hyderabad as the top cities which have shown the largest share of transactions being done digitally. In terms of states, Maharashtra is followed by Karnataka,Tamil Nadu, and Delhi.

The report also highlighted that the festival days continued to show a rapid jump in digital transactions with January registering the highest number of transactions in the first three months. This was mainly driven by the commencement of the Republic Day sale across e-commerce platforms that started on January 23.

The merchant categories which recorded the highest share of transactions were grocery, restaurants, petrol pumps, apparel, and specialty retail.

On Holi, the number of digital payments jumped the most by 53% followed by Republic Day when it jumped by 37%.

Worldline further highlighted that RBL Bank with 19% of the PoS terminals, State Bank of India with 15% and Axis Bank with 14% formed the top three largest merchant acquiring banks in the country. The total number of PoS terminals stood at 3.7 million at the end of March this year.

In terms of the number of cards, the country saw an addition of 10 million new credit cards between March 2019 and March last year. The number of new debit cards added during the same period was 64 million.

However, the number of debit cards fell to 925 million from 988 million in October last year after clean-up of zero balance accounts, the report said.