In a development substantiating its position as India’s flag bearer of FinTech innovation, Unified Payment Interface (UPI) crossed the 400 million mark in September. Ever since its launch, UPI has been leading the waves of disruption in the Indian payment landscape and looks to be doing really well in the most crucial and difficult phase for any new solution/business — consumer adoption — as suggested by its transaction statistics.
The transaction values, as well as the number of transactions per month, have been growing with a steady compounded quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) growth rate of 73.1% and 100.7% respectively. In terms of MoM growth, the transaction value has been growing at a CMGR of 34.33% since November 2016, whereas the CMGR for the number of transactions in the same period is 38.78%.
To put the growth numbers into perspective, the total UPI transaction value in Q3 2018 was almost 11.7 times the value in Q3 2017.
In a previous article[1], I had written about how Indian mobile payments are evolving from PPIs to UPI. The continuing trend is substantiated by the fact that India’s largest mobile wallet provider, Paytm, has not only incorporated UPI services in its offering but has also now topped the UPI charts with a 33% share of UPI transactions in September. Other major players in the UPI space are third-party, non-traditional providers such as Google’s Pay and Flipkart’s PhonePe. The government’s in-house UPI app BHIM’s market share continues to remain overshadowed by these tech giants. However, the government has now mandated all partner banks to rebrand their UPI offerings by prefixing ‘BHIM’ in the name (e.g. BHIM Axis Pay).
Coming back to the
