India’s UPI hits 9 billion transactions worth ₹14 lakh cr: Report

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Thursday said that the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) hit record 9 billion transactions in May this year. The umbrella body for operating retail payments and settlement systems in the country provided the information on its official Twitter handle.

“It's 9 Billion+ transactions in May`23! Make seamless payments from your mobile in real-time with UPI,” the NPCI tweeted.

A PwC India report has earlier stated that UPI transactions are likely to reach 1 billion per day by 2026-27, accounting for 90 percent of the retail digital payments in the country. 

The report titled "The Indian Payments Handbook – 2022-27" stated that UPI accounted for about 75 percent of the total transaction volume in the retail segment during 2022-23. 

The Indian digital payments market saw steady growth at a CAGR of 50 percent (volume-wise) and is expected to reach 411 billion transactions in FY 2026-27 from 103 billion in FY 2022-23, the report said.

"It is estimated that UPI will record 1 billion transactions per day by FY2026–2027, going from 83.71 billion transactions in 2022-23 to 379 billion transactions by 2026-27," it added.

It further said the credit card segment continues to grow at a healthy rate, as card (both debit and credit) payment is one of the most used instruments for retail digital payments after UPI. The volume of transactions in credit cards is expected to surpass debit cards by FY 2024–2025.

While credit card issuance is expected to grow at a healthy CAGR of 21 percent in the next five years, debit card issuance is expected to have a stagnant growth with a CAGR of 3 percent in the same period, the report said.

"The decline in debit card usage is because the major use case of debit card transactions is cash withdrawal, which can now be replaced by an easier way of withdrawing cash using UPI," it added.

The PwC report further said revenue through the credit card business accounts for nearly 76 percent of the overall cards' revenue in 2022–2023, making it a lucrative business segment for banks, NBFCs, and FinTech.