At 1.34 billion, UPI transactions in June beat February’s

BENGALURU: The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform recorded its highest ever monthly transaction volumes of 1.34 billion in June, jumping back to pre-Covid-19 levels. This is a result of higher economic activity and a focus on digital payments. UPI had seen 1.32 billion transactions in February before the virus outbreak in India.
UPI transactions had dipped to under a billion in April — the first time since October 2019 — due to the lockdown, and later started growing in May, signalling recovery.By value, these transitions were to the tune of Rs 2.61 lakh crore, compared to Rs 2.22 lakh crore in February, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which manages UPI.
The recovery in June was led by increased payments for essentials, medicines and grocery shopping along with bill payments through Bharat Bill Pay, which saw over 17 million transactions worth almost Rs 2,970 crore.
“We are close to February numbers. However, we have missed four months of growth. We hope that the economic activity in the country and top cities shall continue, which may help to drive the growth in digital payments in coming months. We are also working with the government to review the zero merchant rate discount, or MDR, on UPI and RuPay, and a reasonable charge will drive ecosystem investments into these homegrown payment systems,” NPCI MD & CEO Dilip Asbe told TOI.
The government made MDR, a fee to facilitate the payments, zero earlier this year, upsetting most in the ecosystem.
Transactions through IMPS have also seen a recovery, though they are not back at pre-Covid-19 levels. June saw almost 199 million transactions worth Rs 2.06 lakh crore, compared to nearly 248 million transactions worth Rs 2.14 lakh crore in February.
“Transaction volumes in most categories and for most use-cases on the PhonePe app are back to pre-lockdown levels. This is driven both, by the fact that offline & online merchants across most parts of the country have now opened up, as well as the record number of recharges and bill payments driven by the increase in new users we have seen over the last three months,” said PhonePe co-founder and CEO Sameer Nigam. His firm is one of the top players on the network, with rivals like Google Pay, Paytm and Amazon Pay.