PremiumNew Delhi: Unified Payments Interface (UPI) based transactions witnessed a new high of 955.02 million during September compared with 918.35 million a month ago, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data showed on Tuesday.
Such transactions were worth ₹1.61 trillion compared with ₹1.54 trillion in August.
According to the data, on a year-on-year basis, there has been a 2.3 times or 135% increase in such transactions. Currently, 141 banks are live on UPI compared with 21 banks at the time of its launch.
The rising popularity of UPI can be attributed to its simple, safe, and hassle-free system. UPI is a real-time payments system that allows users to transfer money across 24x7 across multiple bank accounts, without putting out details of the beneficiary’s bank account. The payments system was developed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) backed NPCI, an umbrella organisation for all retail payments in the country. According to the RBI annual report, the number of transactions via UPI was 1.2 times higher the number of debit card transactions in 2018-19.
The payments system was launched three years ago and picked momentum after the government’s massive exercise to ban high-valued currency — ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes — in November, 2016. Since then, UPI has also been adopted by several prepaid payment instruments or wallets companies such as Paytm and Mobikwik, among others.
The government’s UPI-enabled Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) transactions witnessed a tepid growth of 1.7% to reach 17.18 million in September. Such transactions were worth ₹59.24 billion compared with 61.32 billion in August.
BHIM-based transactions started witnessing a downtrend since January. While there has been a sustained uptrend in the number of transactions since its launch in February, they fell to 12.83 million from 13.98 million in January. The number of transactions started picking up from March.
