UPI transactions grow 19 pc in October, slowest growth in three months

Though the growth rate of UPI transactions fell in October, the value transacted grew 25 percent on month to Rs 74,978 crore in October.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which is the umbrella organisation for retail payments in the country, on Thursday said the total number of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions in the country stood at 482.36 million in October.

This is an 18.8 percent increase from September, when the total number of UPI transactions were at 405.87 million, marking this the slowest increase in transactions on the UPI network since August. The month-on-month growth rate in UPI transactions has averaged around 30 percent since August.

The value transacted on the UPI network, though, grew significantly to Rs 74,978 crore in October from Rs 59,835.36 crore in September, showing a strong 25 percent growth. Between August and September, the value of transactions had grown only 10.3 percent.

This growth in transaction value can be attributed to the offers that ecommerce platform ran on UPI during the month. After its Great Indian Festival, which ended mid-October, Amazon India, in a release said its platform saw 3.5x increase in customers using UPI and RuPay for electronic transactions.

Around then, Flipkart-owned PhonePe also said UPI payments saw phenomenal growth and accounted for over 55 percent of all payments on the platform during The Big Billion Days. Paytm, in a statement said it registered close to 179 million UPI transactions on its platform in October.

Industry experts say NPCI’s new circular to curb the number of P2P transactions from a single bank account to 10 over 24 hours could be one of the reasons for the lower growth rate (in transactions), and slightly nullify the effect of ecommerce offers.

The NPCI in its circular had stated that the curb was ‘only for P2P transactions originating from a unique bank account’ and did not apply to merchant transactions. According to the NPCI, the move is expected to encourage genuine transactions in the UPI ecosystem and bring in rationality.