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The National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) mobile-only digital payment ecosystem – Unified Payment Interface (UPI) – has completed two years of existence. During this period, users of UPI notched up a total transaction value of ₹3.17-lakh crore via 210 crore transactions.
It was on August 25, 2016, when banks started uploading their UPI-enabled apps on Google Play.
Around ₹3.1 crore was handled through almost 93,000 transactions when 21 banks went live on the UPI in August 2016. According to the NPCI’s August 2018 data, ₹54,212 crore was handled in 31.2 crore transactions, with 114 banks live on the UPI. The UPI, which offers seamless movement of money, helps people transact either using their mobile phone number or the virtual payment address. Apart from transferring money immediately through mobile phones, the UPI helps users access different bank accounts through a single app.
Demonetisation push
Speaking at the recent launch of UPI 2.0, Nandan Nilekani, Advisor (Innovation), NPCI, had said that UPI had grown considerably since demonetisation in November 2016.
The amount handled on the UPI was around ₹48.6 crore via around one lakh transactions in October 2016. That burgeoned to crossed ₹100 crore via 2.85 lakh transactions by November 2016 and ₹700 crore in 19.67 lakh transactions by December of that year. Nilekani had also said that the UPI had been the catalyst for retail payment systems with many banks building products around it, and the fintech industry and other IT players providing innovative solutions for end-user delight.
The UPI seems to have got a boost (both in terms of volumes and amount handled) since December 2017. The amount transacted on the UPI increased from ₹13,144 crore in 14.5 crore transactions in December 2017 to ₹27,021 crore in 19 crore transactions in April 2018.
Stakeholders from different sectors of the society use the UPI ecosystem for payment options. In March, NPCI announced that National Agriculture Market (e-NAM), a pan-India electronic trading portal that networks APMC mandis , had gone live on the UPI.
The NPCI had announced in May that the UPI can be used on Amazon’s e-commerce platform for making payments. Recently, the NPCI said that BookMyShow had integrated the UPI across all its platforms for making payments.
Stating that the UPI would start moving the needle on cashless transactions, Nilekani had said the UPI would be the dominant digital transaction system over the next couple of years.
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