UPI transactions rose 15% in March: NPCI

The number of transactions done through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) rose 15% to 858.5 crore in March compared to February.

Compared to March 2022, volume of UPI transactions rose 47% last month.

The total value of UPI transactions rose 14% to Rs 14.1 lakh crore in March, compared to Rs 12.35 lakh crore in February, according to data by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm remained the top three apps for UPI-enabled payments, with Walmart-owned PhonePe having processed 407.63 crore transactions worth Rs 7.07 lakh crore in March. Together, the three apps accounted for about 94% of the total number of transactions and 96% of all payments in terms of value, NPCI data showed.

Kunal Shah’s CRED secured the fourth spot in terms of value by logging 4.28 crore transactions worth Rs 21,056 crore in March. Amazon Pay ranked fifth in the list in terms of volume with 5360 crore transactions.

A total of 399 banks were live on UPI last month, up from 390 in February.

Speaking at TechSparks Mumbai 2023 last month, Dilip Asbe, CEO of the NPCI, had said that India is inching closer to processing 1 billion digital transactions a day, and that NPCI is preparing to handle 10 billion daily transactions.

At present, NPCI processes close to 300 million UPI transactions daily. In February, it processed 7.5 billion transactions.

Asbe also highlighted NPCI’s grand plans to take UPI globally. “We are giving the tech stack to smaller countries for free, and we are charging them for the cost we incur in implementing it,” Asbe said. “We are charging some of the small countries as low as a couple of million dollars,” he had said.