The RBI-administered retail umbrella body for all retail payment is targeting a daily volume of 5 million transactions through RuPay cards by next December.
"Usage of RuPay cards at point of sale (PoSes) and for e-commerce together that used to be about 3 lakh per day (before the demonetisation), is now about 2.1 million, which is a seven-times jump," NPCI managing director and chief executive AP Hota told PTI in an interaction.
On November 8, the government demonetised high value worth over Rs 20.51 trillion notes, or 86 per cent of the currency in circulation. This was followed with curbs on cash withdrawals both from the branch counters and ATMs.
This led to a cash crunch as the Reserve Bank could not print enough notes for distribution and replenish the money equivalent to the scrapped amount.
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With less cash in hand, people were forced to adopt digital transactions leading to an increase in usage of cards and other alternative modes for making payments.
"We should have a minimum 5 million transactions per day. I would say a less-cash society has arrived when we start seeing at least 5 million RuPay card transactions a day," he said.
But Hota, who is on deputation from the RBI, was quick to admit that it will take at least another year or so to reach to that level.
When asked whether the UPI can decimate the e-wallets,
which the industry led by banks are fearing now, Hota said UPI is not a threat to anyone.
The market is so large that other platforms like the mobile wallets from Paytm and others can still make a large profitable business, he said.
"I don't think UPI is a threat to e-wallets. The transactions volume is so high that UPI alone cannot meet the demand. Existence of about 30-plus e-wallets is a quite a helpful thing. We alone cannot do that," he said.