UPI volume, value contract for first time in 10 months even as YoY growth nearly doubles

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transaction volume and value have witnessed a contraction in February 2021 — the first time since April last year. From 2302.73 million transactions involving Rs 4,31,181.89 crore processed in January 2021, the number of transactions declined to 2,292.90 million worth Rs 4,25,062.76 crore in February 2021, according to the data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). UPI transactions in April last year had declined to 999.57 million amounting to Rs 1,51,140.66 crore from 1,246.84 million transactions worth Rs 2,06,462.31 crore in the preceding month.

However, the year-on-year growth in UPI transactions stood at 73 per cent in February 2021 even as the value nearly doubled by 91 per cent. February 2020 volume stood at 1,325.69 million transactions worth Rs 2,22,516.95 crore. The number of banks going live on UPI also increased from 146 in February 2020 to 213 in February 2020. UPI transactions had ended 2020 on a high note with the total value storming past the Rs 4-lakh-crore mark in December to Rs 4.16 lakh crore across 2,234.16 million transactions.

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While the NPCI is yet to release bank and app-wise data for their February UPI transactions, Walmart-owned PhonePe had remained the leading UPI-app in terms of volume and value in January 2021. The company had processed 968.72 million transactions involving nearly Rs 1.92 lakh crore. In fact, PhonePe’s volume was over 100 million transactions higher than Google Pay’s 853.53 million transactions worth Rs 1.77 lakh crore. On the other hand, Paytm Payments Bank had remained the distant third player with a volume of 332.69 million worth Rs 37,845.76 crore. The combined transaction volume of the three leading UPI apps stood at 93.5 per cent share of the total January volume of 2,302.73 million while the value share stood at 94.5 per cent of Rs 4.31 lakh crore.

Importantly, among India’s top 30 UPI remitter banks witnessing UPI transaction failures due to technical reasons, public sector lender Union Bank of India had the highest failure in January. From 10.75 per cent technical decline (TD) in December, the failure rate jumped to 12.89 per cent in January for Union Bank of India. Andhra Bank and Indian Bank recorded the second and third highest TD rate of 10.40 per cent and 9.83 per cent respectively in January.