Boost to Modi’s initiative; digital payments through UPI see 20% jump in March

In a major boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initiatives, digital payments through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) surged to Rs 2,000 crore in March, a 20% jump from January.

As per the data by Reserve Bank of India (RBI), transactions through UPI, mobile-based national payment system, jumped to Rs 2,000 crore in March, up from Rs 1,660 crore in January.

"We already have 44 banks on UPI, of which 35 have their own applications available on the (Google) Play Store; BHIM is seeing around 80,000 transactions per day; and we are registering almost 2 lakh transactions on the entire UPI railroad," said AP Hota, managing director at National Payments Corporation of India, the body that runs the UPI platform and BHIM app.

The surge in UPI is due to BHIM app (Bharat Interface for Money) and non-bank payment apps such as PhonePe and Trupay.

"We have already tied up with Reliance Retail for UPI transactions on point of sales terminals and are planning to get more merchants on board to start accepting UPI-based payments," Hota said.

Sameer Nigam, CEO at Flipkart's payment app PhonePe, said the app accounts for almost half the number of all UPI transactions and 22-25% of total value of such transactions.

"For us because of the Flipkart partnership we are observing a significant chunk of this payment for merchant transactions as well besides only peer to peer payments," he told ET, adding “together with UPI and our wallet-based payments we will reach around $1.3 billion worth of payments in an annualised manner.”