About 29 pc of urban Indian businesses accept UPI/e-wallets, says report

Close to 42 percent of urban businesses in the country are aware of unified payments interface (UPI)/e-wallets as means of receiving payments, and nearly 29 percent of them are accepting these digital payment options, as per Kantar's ITOPS report.

The findings are based on a study of over 7,000 businesses from 35 cities and urban locations.

Kantar is a market research and consulting firm. ITOPS is an annual syndicated study of Kantar to determine penetration, usage, and profile of technology and digital products amongst micro and small businesses in urban India.

"About 42 percent of urban businesses are aware of UPI/e-wallets as a means of receiving payments from their customers, and about 29 percent of them use UPI/e-wallets for receiving payments," the report said.

It said Tier-I cities of Delhi and Mumbai lead the adoption of UPI/e-wallets, with about 45 percent of businesses having adopted it.

Smaller cities like Rohtak, Haldia, among others also show high adoption with more than one in every three businesses adopting UPI/e-wallets, though transaction volumes are low, the report showed.

"This indicates the penetration of UPI/ e-wallets goes beyond the larger cities and there is definitely a demand for merchant transactions in the smaller cities too, which is driving businesses to adopt such services for their customers," it added.

The report said close to half of the businesses using digital payments are in retail segment, and the ones relatively averse to digital adoption are travel, trade, transport, logistics and education.

"Our data indicates that about a third of the urban businesses have started exploring the possibility of adopting digital payments for their business since the lockdown," Kantar's executive vice-president (insights division) Biswapriya Bhattacharjee said.

"We believe that this shift amongst businesses is here to stay as businesses realise the ease with which they can do their business, especially in the urban cities," he added.

As per the report, cash continues to have a dominant share in the market. Across the entire market, the share of cash is currently 87 percent.

"However, amongst the users of UPI/e-wallets, the share of cash is much lower at 58 percent," it said.

This indicates that businesses using UPI/e-wallets are also adopting other digital payment options in addition to UPI/e-wallets, the report added.