NPCI reaches the landmark of 1 billion monthly transactions in July

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the umbrella organisation for retail payments systems in the country, reached the landmark of one billion monthly transactions across all its payment systems in July 2017, the company announced on Friday.

Starting its services in January 2010 with a monthly transaction volume of close to 50 million, the company has taken more than seven years to reach a billion monthly transactions.

Speaking on the occasion, AP Hota, MD & CEO, NPCI, said,

“It gives us a great deal of satisfaction that NPCI has truly emerged as the powerhouse of all financial transactions in India. It is a great achievement to join the leagues of reputed payment institutions which process billions of transactions every month globally.”

According to a press statement, all types of payments handled by NPCI ranging from cheque clearing and ATM clearing to IMPS, UPI, BHIM, RuPay, POS, e-commerce and also Aadhaar-based payments constitute the one billion monthly transaction volume. NPCI operates 12 payment systems now.

“Highest growth has been seen in the mobile payments and Aadhaar-based payments. This change was achieved by adding new products to NPCI’s portfolio and widening the membership of all products. The next logical target can be a billion transactions a day may be in 3 years,” Hota said.

Earlier this week, NPCI announced that its flagship product Unified Payments Interface (UPI) had registered an increase of more than 10 percent in transactions volume in July to a total of 11.63 million.

The company said the UPI volume (UPI, BHIM and USSD 2.0 - *99#) during the last three months were 9.36 million, 10.35 million and 11.63 million while the value stood at Rs 2,797.07 crore, Rs 3,098.36 crore, and Rs 3,411.35 crore in May, June and July 2017, respectively.

While these numbers are impressive by themselves, KalaGato, provider of market and competitive intelligence, in a report stated that private competitor PhonePe had beaten BHIM in terms of reach or app installs in July.

However, when checked by YourStory, both apps stood at the 10-million mark on the Google app store.

The KalaGato report also states that the attrition rate (or uninstall rate) of these apps stood at 18.68 percent for BHIM between January 2017 to April 2017 and 20.61 percent for PhonePe.

With UPI 2.0 in the works, it will be interesting to see its adoption following the launch.