UPI transactions hit a new high of 10 million on a single day

New Delhi: Transactions through the unified payments interface (UPI) have reached a new peak with more than 10 million transactions being conducted through the platform on Wednesday.

This is a significant milestone for a payments system that was launched less than two years ago. It is even more significant as last year in June, the monthly UPI transactions were around 10 million.

UPI is a payments system launched by 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 details of the beneficiary’s bank account.

“Proud to share that we hit 10 million UPI transactions in a single day. #InstantPayments #10Million #DigitalIndia #HighOnUPI @dilipasbe,” NPCI’s Bharat interface for money (BHIM) handle tweeted late on Wednesday.

Transactions through UPI received a major stimulus from the government after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the BHIM app on 30 December, 2016.

On Thursday, department of financial services secretary Rajeev Kumar, tweeted “#NewIndia embracing digitisation wholeheartedly. UPI transaction hits the milestone of 10M/day. Steady increase from 169 M (Dec17) to 236 M (May18). An increase of 40% in 6 months. @digitalindia @pmoindia @finminindia.”

In May, around 189.5 million transactions, amounting to Rs33,289 crore, were conducted through the UPI platform. Of this, 14 million transactions amounting to Rs5,748.5 crore took place through the BHIM platform.

Till now, there have been more than 27 million downloads of the BHIM app on Android platform and around 1.4 million downloads on iOS platform.

In the last one year, the monthly UPI transaction volume has risen around 2,000%, NPCI data showed.

“Most of the UPI transactions are person-to-person (P2P) transfers. The incentives given to consumers in the form of cashbacks, by the government on P2P payments and by e-commerce companies during purchase of goods and services have significantly promoted its usage,” said Dewang Neralla, chief executive, Atom Technologies Ltd, a payments service provider.

UPI was launched in August 2016 with 21 banks, and is now offered by about 101 banks.