India clocks Rs 10.2-trn digital payments in Q1

Mumbai: India saw 9.36 billion transactions amounting to Rs10.25 trillion in the first quarter (January-March period) via various payment modes led by Unified Payment Interface (UPI), a new report showed on Monday.

The UPI P2M (person to merchant) transactions emerged as the most preferred payment mode among consumers with a market share of 64 per cent in volume and 50 per cent in terms of value, according to the report by Worldline, a global leader in payments industry.

In Q1 2022, UPI clocked over 14.55 billion transactions in volume and Rs 26.19 trillion in terms of value.

Its transactions volume and value has almost doubled since last year recording about a 99 per cent increase in volume and over 90 per cent increase in value compared to Q1 2021.

As of the first quarter, the top UPI apps in terms of volume were PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm Payments Bank App, Amazon Pay, Axis banks App while top PSP UPI Players were YES Bank, Axis Bank, State Bank of India, HDFC Bank and Paytm Payments Bank.

Among the top UPI Apps, Phone Pe, Google Pay and Paytm accounted for 94.8 per cent of UPI transactions volume and 93 per cent of UPI transactions value as of March 2022, the report showed.

The average ticket size (ATS) for UPI P2P (peer-to-peer) transactions was Rs 2,455 and Rs 860 for P2M transactions (as of March).

Credit cards accounted for 7 per cent of transactions, but 26 per cent of value, indicating that customers still prefer to use their credit cards for high value transactions.

Debit cards account for 10 per cent of transactions, but 18 per cent in value. The volume has shrunk from previous years likely because of the rise of UPI. As of March, the total number of POS terminals deployed by merchant acquiring banks were 6.07 million with over half a million POS terminals deployed during Q1 2022. The POS deployment witnessed over 28 per cent growth in Q1 2022 compared to a year before.

As of March, the total number of Bharat QRs were 4.97 million, a 39 per cent rise as compared to March 2021 while UPI QRs stood at 172.73 million, registering an increase of 87 per cent as compared to March 2021. The total number of credit and debit cards in circulation by the end of Q1 2022 was 991.28 million.

As of January, there were about 658 million Internet users and about 1.2 billion mobile subscribers in India. In Q1 2022, consumers made 15.6 billion mobile based payments whereas net banking/Internet browser-based transactions were over 1 billion, the report showed.