UPI transactions cross 500 million in November

New Delhi: Monthly transactions through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) crossed the 500 million mark for the first time in November, data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Saturday showed.

Under the UPI, 524.94 million transactions amounting to ₹ 82,232.21 crore were carried out during the month, a 9% increase in transaction volume, compared with 482.36 million transactions worth ₹ 74,978.27 crore in October.

Also read: UPI transactions in October increases by 19% in volume

“Proud to share that UPI has reached a remarkable new milestone by crossing 524+ million transactions...#HighOnUPI #CashlessTransactions,” NPCI twitted on Saturday.

However, it is not clear whether the data includes or excludes transactions with debit/credit in the same account for the month of November. NPCI did not mention anything on its website regarding such transactions as it did while releasing the figures for August.

In a move aimed at curbing fake transactions and regulating fintech companies from inflating their UPI numbers, the NPCI had asked banks to stop transactions originating from different UPI applications with the debit and the credit happening in the same account, from 1 August.

In September, the monthly transactions through UPI had crossed 400 million for the first time.

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 to the UPI. Also, a one-time feature allowing customers to pre-authorise a transaction and pay at a later date, and the invoice-in-the-box feature allowing customers to check the invoice sent by merchants before making a payment were introduced. The signed intent and QR feature enables customers to check the authenticity of merchants while scanning the QR codes.

Also read: Now UPI allows you to transfer money from one bank account to only 10 people per day

However, fintech companies are still not been allowed to use the UPI 2.0 platform, with confusion over the usage of Aadhaar linked features following the Supreme Court’s verdict.

Last week, NPCI suspended the e-sign based e-mandate product in a move to comply with the judgment of the Supreme Court ,which disallowed private entities from using the unique ID for verifying their customers.

Of the total UPI transactions in November, 17.35 million amounting to ₹ 7,981.82 crore took place through the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) platform.

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. Till now, there have been more than 35.5 million downloads of the BHIM app on the Android platform and around 1.7 million on the iOS platform.

Transactions through the UPI 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.

Also read: Why India lags peers in digital payments