Digital payments firm PhonePe has emerged as the top app on India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in January, and increased its lead over Google Pay, while Paytm Payments Bank came a distant third.
According to the data released by the National Payments Corporation of India, a government body that runs the UPI, PhonePe processed 968.72 million UPI transactions involving nearly 1.92 trillion rupees (US$ 26.38 billion) in January. This is over 100 million transactions more than that of Google Pay (853.53 million and worth 1.77 trillion rupees or $24.32 billion). In December, PhonePe was top for the first time and processed 902.03 million transactions, while Google Pay processed 854.49 million. Paytm Payments Bank’s tally in January was 332.69 million transactions worth 378 billion rupees.
The three apps are dominating the UPI ecosystem and account for 93.5% of the January volume of 2.3 billion transactions, while in terms of value it was 94.5% at 4.31 trillion rupees ($59.21 billion). Transactions processed by Amazon Pay and WhatsApp stood at 46.30 million (40 billion rupees) and 0.56 million (3.6 million rupees) respectively.
WhatsApp’s January volume declined over 30% from its December tally (0.81 million transactions) amid fears over the messaging apps plan to share users’ data with its parent Facebook. But it still managed a UPI transaction value higher than December (2.97 million rupees).
The Unified Payments Interface platform witnessed a steady growth in 2020, barring a dip in April, when a countrywide lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19 was in force. In December the number of transactions on the platform was 2.23 billion, while in May it was just around 1.23 billion.
