UPI adds a billion transactions in two months, hits 11 bn mark amid festive season: RBI Bulletin

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) added another billion to reach 11 billion transactions in a short span of two months—the quickest addition of a billion—to date, the Reserve Bank said on Thursday in its monthly bulletin.

The apex bank said that buoyed by the festival season, digital payments witnessed a strong expansion in October 2023, with growth (y-o-y) under major payment modes outpacing the increase in the previous month. 

“The Initial Public Offering (IPO) facility through UPI exhibited robust adoption, with the number of mandates nearly doubling in October 2023 over the corresponding month in 2022,” the RBI monthly bulletin added.

The RBI said credit cards continued their ascent, supported by cashbacks, reward points, contactless cards, and UPI-linked credit cards.

In September last week, the global payments service provider Worldline said the UPI transactions in India surged by 62% in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period last year. 

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The UPI transactions reached 9.3 billion in June 2023, up from 151 million in January 2018, primarily driven by the growth in Person-to-Merchant (P2M) transactions, the report on ‘India Digital Payments Report for H1 2023’ said.

The report said out of the total 51.91 billion UPI transactions conducted between January and June this year, 29.15 billion were P2M payments, accounting for approximately 56.1% of the total. 

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In January 2022, P2M transactions accounted for 40.3% of all UPI transactions compared to 57.5% in June 2023. The remaining transactions, grew from 18.62 billion transactions in H1’22 to 22.75 billion in H1’23; a 22% increase. During the same period, the value of P2P transactions grew from ₹45.52 trillion to ₹63.99, a 41% increase, the report added.

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The RBI further said, “to foster an orderly development of the crossborder payments domain, the apex has decided to regulate entities involved in payment and settlement for cross-border export/import transactions, designating them as “Payment Aggregators – Cross Border (PA-CB)” under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007.”