UPI hits record high in April with 5.58 bn transactions worth Rs 9.83 trn

India’s flagship digital payment platform, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), has started the current financial year (FY23) on a positive note, with 5.58 billon transactions amounting to Rs 9.83 trillion processed in April. This is a record high for the payment platform, both in terms of volume and value of transactions since its inception. Last month (March), UPI breached 5 billion transactions in a month for the first time.

Compared to March, volume of transactions was up 3.33 per cent and value of transactions was up 2.36 per cent. In March, UPI processed 5.4 billion transactions amounting to Rs 9.6 trillion.

However, on a year-on-year (YoY) basis, the volume of transactions jumped 111 per cent and value of transactions increased by almost 100 per cent. In April 2021, UPI had processed 2.64 billion transactions worth Rs 4.93 trillion. Initially in FY22, transactions had dipped slightly due to the second of the wave of the pandemic. But, since then, UPI transactions have been on an upward trajectory, mirroring the recovery in the broader economy.

Infact, the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital payments in the country in the last two years. In FY22, UPI processed more than 46 billion transactions amounting to over Rs 84.17 trillion, thus breaching the $1 trillion mark. And, in FY21, it had processed 22.28 billion transactions, amounting to Rs 41.03 trillion. So, both volume and value of transactions doubled in a year’s time, indicating the meteoric rise seen in the adoption of digital payments, especially UPI, in the country.

Further, since the pandemic began, UPI’s transaction volume and value has gone up by over 350 per cent. While initially UPI was considered as a preferred payment mode for peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions, it has now emerged as the preferred mode for even peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions, with over 56 per cent market share in volume terms in 2021.

UPI crossed 1 billion transactions for the first time in October 2019, almost 3 years after its launch in 2016. But, the next billion came in under a year, as in October 2020, UPI processed more than 2 billion transactions. In the next ten months, UPI processed 3 billion transactions. And, it took only three months for the payment platform to reach 4 billion transactions per month, from 3 billion. And, the incremental one billion transactions were achieved in just six months’ time.

The next target for UPI is to process a billion transactions a day in the next 3 – 5 years. According to experts, the next boost to the already burgeoning UPI transactions will come the AutoPay feature, which has seen massive adoption since recurring payments through cards saw disruption due to the Reserve Bank of India’s new guidelines on e-mandates. The AutoPay feature of UPI allows recurring payments of upto Rs 5,000.

Recent initiatives of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and NPCI will also boost the transaction count and value in the coming days. NPCI has launched the “on-device” wallet feature for UPI users, which will be known as “UPI Lite”, for facilitating small ticket transactions. NPCI is of the opinion that this “on-device” wallet feature will go a long way in achieving its pipe dream of processing one billion transactions a day in the next 3-5 years. Further, the RBI in association with NPCI has launched the UPI123Pay for 400 million feature phones which will allow all transactions to be done through feature phones without an internet connection.