For the first time, UPI clocks over 500 million transactions in a month

Despite the slowest month on month growth since July, UPI recorded 524.94 million transactions in November, reports NPCI data. 

In a first since its inception in August 2016, NPCI-owned UPI crossed the half-billion mark in the volume of transactions in a month. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said that the total number of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions stood at 524.94 million this November.

However, the month-on-month growth rate of 8.8 percent is the slowest for the payments platform since July, when transactions fell by 4.3 percent. As of October, the total UPI transactions stood at 482.36 million.

One of the major reasons for this fall could be NPCI’s October circular that cut the number of P2P transactions allowed from a single bank account to 10 over 24 hours, from the earlier 20. The organisation stated that the timestamp of the first transaction will be considered as the start time. 

According to the payments' body, this move was expected to encourage genuine transactions in the UPI ecosystem, and bring in rationality. Further, to curb fraudulent and repetitive transactions, it announced that it was blocking transactions with the same source and destination account starting August 1.

The total value of payments made through the platform in November stood at Rs 82,232.21 crore, a nine percent increase since October when it was Rs 74,978.27 crore.

In August, the platform crossed the 1 billion-transactions mark, and took only three more months to double that number and crossed the 2 billion mark in October. 

In July, the Indian retail payments organisation also launched UPI 2.0, the much-awaited upgraded version of the service. The new version allowed merchants to link overdraft accounts and send invoices along with payment requests in the inbox.

NPCI also allowed users to set up a one-time mandate, essentially allowing users to block a certain amount in the customer’s account balance.