India’s UPI processed Rs 1 trillion in transaction value in December 2018

The volume of transactions for UPI grew by 18 percent in December to 620.17 million.

After crossing the 500 million transaction volume in November, payment infrastructure Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in December hit another milestone processing more than Rs 1 trillion (or Rs 1,02,594 crores) in transaction value on its network.

This is a 24 percent increase since November.

Even the volume of transactions for UPI grew by 18 percent in the month of December to 620.17 million. In November, the total number of transactions processed by UPI stood at 524.94 million.

The 18 percent growth rate seems promising especially after November had seen one of the slowest growth rates of 8.8 percent for the network.

Last year had been quite an action-packed year for the payment network with National Payments Corporation of India launching the much-awaited upgrade of the service, UPI 2.0. The new version allowed merchants to link overdraft accounts and send invoices along with payment requests in the inbox.

Apart from the upgrade, NPCI also took steps to curb fake transactions on the network.

In October last year, the NPCI 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.

In August last year, to curb fraudulent and repetitive transactions, it announced that it was blocking transactions with the same source and destination account. Further, in July, the Central government discontinued the BHIM incentive scheme for merchants, while making revisions to the BHIM cashback scheme for individuals and users.

Under new guidelines, the incentives were to be paid only to the new users of the BHIM app, with the validity of this new scheme lasting until March 31, 2019.