UPI transactions cross ₹2 lakh crore mark for first time in December

New Delhi: The value of transactions made through unified payments interface doubled over last year to breach the Rs 2-lakh-crore mark in December, the first time since its inception. The platform recorded more than 131 crore transactions during the month, according to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India Ltd.—the manager and operator of UPI. The NPCI, in a tweet, said the transactions value rose 7 percent month-on-month from Rs 1.89 lakh crore and 122 crore transactions in November. The UPI network had crossed the Rs 1-lakh-crore transaction value in December 2018.

Private service providers, such as Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm, have dominated the UPI space, accounting for most of the transactions. Government-owned BHIM continues to trail at 1.29 percent of the total transaction value as of November—the latest data are not available yet. Facebook Inc.-owned messaging service WhatsApp, too, is set to launch its own payments service built upon the UPI network.

Dilip Asbe, chief executive officer at the NPCI, had previously said the umbrella body was working on introducing UPI in international markets such as Dubai and Singapore. Overall, the application aims to have 500 million users by 2022, he had told Mint in an interview in October 2019.

The UPI payments system has received international recognition for being a strong peer-to-peer payments technology. Google has recommended to the U.S. Federal Reserve to implement a real-time payments platform along the lines of UPI. But as the value and volume of transactions rise, cases of frauds have also been increasing. BloombergQuint in November had reported that fraudsters had been targeting UPI’s collect payments feature to defraud users. The NPCI, too, has been frequently releasing advisories to users, warning them against frauds.