In India, Unified Payments Interface or UPI is showing exponential growth in the digital payment era. As per the March month data released by the payment authorities, UPI crossed 2.73 billion transactions worth Rs 5.04 trillion in March. Compared to the March 2020 data, it is a two-fold surge.
Current Status of UPI Payments
In February 2021, UPI completed a total of 2.29 billion transactions successfully. Their total worth was Rs 4,25,062 crore. PhonePe is ruling the chart in terms of the maximum share of UPI transactions. It completed 975.53 million transactions with a whopping 42.5% market share. PhonePe, Bengaluru based payment processing firm, left Google Pay behind to secure the first place. Google Pay completed 827.86 transactions to continue its second position in UPI transactions.
Current details were shared by NPCI on the Twitter platform. Market share statistics of March month is not yet known.
In March, PhonePe claimed that the firm had crossed 1 billion UPI transactions.
PhonePe said:
“We crossed a billion UPI transactions in March. The total transactions in March across payment instruments wallet, card and UPI were recorded at 1.3 billion. Our annual TPV run-rate in March was $388 billion.”
A Paytm spokesperson claimed that the company has crossed 1.4 billion transactions in March including all payment methods like Paytm wallet, UPI, cards, and net-banking.
New UPI Transaction Rule and Other Details
NPCI is bringing a new rule to remove the monopoly of top players like PhonePe and Google Pay. It is allowing a maximum UPI cap of 30% to a third-party app like Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, and others. It may not affect the other UPI apps except PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm. PhonePe and Google Pay are controlling the 80% market share of UPI transactions.
As per the new procedure implemented by NPCI, all third-party apps will alert the payment authorities if they reach the 30% mark.
While the NPCI’s cap is effective from January 1, 2021, existing players like Google Pay and PhonePe will get an extension of six months or more to comply with the new rules. That means from July month onwards, no third-party app will be allowed to do UPI transactions of more than 30% market share.
If we talk about the February month data of UPI transactions, PhonePe had a market share of 42.5% followed by Google Pay’s 36.11%. Paytm is a distant third-place holder with a market share of 14.86%. Axis Bank contributed 2.82% in UPI transactions to establish itself at fourth position, whereas Amazon Pay secured the fifth position with a market share of 1.93%.
