UPI clocks 674 mn transactions in February, continues growth momentum

Unified Payments Interface, the instant inter-bank fund transfer mechanism has clocked 674 million transactions in the month of February, as per latest data released by the National Payments Corporation of India which runs the payment rails. This is a slight jump of 0.3% against January where the transactions stood at 672 million.

February with 28 days has still managed to report a more than 10.9% average daily transaction growth, said NPCI. Comparing year on year the jump stood at almost 300%, last year in February UPI had clocked 171 million transactions.

In terms of value of transactions, February reported more than Rs 1 lakh crore worth of transactions. This is the third month in a row that NPCI has reported more than Rs 1 lakh crore of transactions on UPI.

Besides UPI, NPCI also shared numbers around IMPS, another inter bank fund transfer mechanism. In case of IMPS, the February figures stood at 166 million in terms of number of transactions and for amount of money that was transferred it stood at almost Rs 1.5 lakh crore. IMPS is typically higher value transfers, while UPI has major use case of small value peer to peer transactions and micro merchant transactions.

In its February 11 edition ET wrote that Paytm was leading the race in terms of number of transactions on UPI in January with more than 220 million transactions, closely followed by Google Pay and PhonePe. With mobile wallets falling out of favour in the retail payments space, UPI has been gaining tremendously.

Further sources have also pointed out to ET that merchant transactions continue to be in the range of 100 to 120 million per month, showing that predominantly it is P2P transactions where UPI is being used. Multiple banks along with players like BharatPe and Benow have been onboarding merchants to install QR code based payments through UPI.

While retail payments are being dominated by UPI and IMPS, NETC (National Electronic Toll Collection) is showing early promise. As per latest data 22 banks have issued more than 4.3 million Fastag tags to vehicles through which some 23.8 million transactions have been done in February. More than Rs 500 crore of toll payments have happened digitally in the month, said NPCI.