UPI sees first fall in monthly transactions since August 2016
1 min read 02 Aug 2018, 02:19 PM IST235.65 million UPI transactions worth 45,845.64 crore took place in July as compared to 246.37 million and 40,834.03 crore in June
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New Delhi: Monthly transactions through the unified payments interface (UPI) fell in July, the first decline since its inception in August 2016, according to National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) data.
The number of UPI transactions fell 4.5% to 235.65 million in July from 246.37 million in the previous month, data released late on Wednesday said. The value of transactions conducted through the UPI platform, however, rose to a new peak. Transactions amounting to ₹ 45,846 crore were carried out during July as compared to ₹ 40,834 crore in the preceding month.
NPCI did not disclose transaction figures for Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) in July.
PhonePe, a payments app which works on the UPI platform claims to have contributed to around 40% of the UPI transactions recorded in July, surpassing Paytm and BHIM.
PhonePe also crossed the 100 million transaction mark in July, becoming the fastest Indian digital payments company to achieve this feat, the company claimed.
“Our growth in market share is largely fuelled by two factors. One, we have added lakhs of new offline and online merchants on our platform in recent months and are seeing exponential growth in merchant transactions. Two, NPCI recently started blocking any UPI transactions where the sender and receiver bank account number are the same. This block by NPCI has effectively limited the ability of certain companies from incentivizing shell transactions and artificially inflating their UPI numbers," said Sameer Nigam, chief executive officer and co-founder of PhonePe.
UPI is a payments system launched by the NPCI, the umbrella organisation for all retail payments in the country, which facilitates instant fund transfer between two bank accounts on a mobile platform, without requiring any detail of the beneficiary’s bank account.
Transactions through UPI received a major boost after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the BHIM app on 30 December 2016. UPI was launched with 21 banks and is now offered by about 114 banks.
