UPI BREAKS ALL RECORDS DURING LOCKDOWN ESPECIALLY IN JULY CROSSES 1.34bn TRANSACTIONS
Due to fear of the spread of the Coronavirus, the wide adoption of Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm and other UPI-based apps have driven this growth of UPI transactions as people have been avoiding swiping credit and debit cards. UPI has recorded 13408.22 million or 1.34 billion transactions amounting to Rs 2,58,244 crore or Rs 2.58 trillion until July 28, which shows the data released by RBI. UPI had registered 1336.93 million transactions in June worth Rs 2,61,835 crore.
Due to the nationwide lockdown that had halted almost all kinds of business activities in April, the number of transactions had fallen to 999 million. Steadily coming out of the sharp drop it registered during the lockdown in April remarkably well, data of 28 days in July shows UPI is set to better its previous best numbers in June in terms of processing volume and amount of transactions.
The amount of transactions processed via UPI looks set to be a new record. At this rate, UPI is likely to register around 1.48 billion transactions, making it the best ever month for the NPCI-owned digital payments interface.
As people are preferring online payments, especially UPI, to pay for groceries, medicine, daily essentials to electronics and gadgets buying the numbers have bounced back to its pre-Covid days.
Besides peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions, India also saw a surge in peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions during and after the lockdown. In the P2M payments space, PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm are the top three players while Amazon Pay and BharatPe have also emerged as significant market shareholders.
RBI has set up a committee to study on interoperability, scalability, innovation, awareness, privacy, and security of the QR Code payments system, to increase the adoption of digital payments and bring more merchants into the ecosystem.
In its report, RBI also criticized the decision of zero MDR on QR Code, UPI, and Rupay debit cards by the government and said that it had a negative impact on the digital payments ecosystem.
NPCI’s CEO Dilip Asbe also supported the concerns raised by RBI and emphasized that MDR is necessary and it may come back soon.
