UPI processes 8.7 bln transactions in March, highest ever since inception

UPI transactions in March 2023 were over 60 per cent and 46 per cent higher in volume and value terms from the year-ago period, according to NPCI

India’s flagship digital payment platform – Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – ended the financial year (FY23) on a high, with March seeing 8.7 billion transactions being processed on the platform, the highest ever since its inception, amounting to Rs 14.05 trillion. This is another record high for the platform.

According to National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) data, UPI transactions in March 2023 were over 60 per cent and 46 per cent higher in volume and value terms from the year-ago period. Last year in March, UPI had processed 5.4 billion transactions, amounting to Rs 9.6 trillion.

UPI processed 8 billion transactions for the first time in January, but transactions dipped slightly in February due to fewer days in the month.

Launched in 2016, it took the platform three years to reach the milestone of processing a billion transactions a month in October 2019. But, since then, the incremental billion transactions have come in a very quick time. In under a year, in October 2020, it processed over 2 billion transactions a month. And, within the next ten months, UPI processed over 3 billion transactions in a month.

It took only three months for the payment platform to reach 4 billion transactions per month, from 3 billion. The incremental 1 billion transactions were achieved in just 6 months’ time. The journey from 5 billion transactions per month to 6 billion was traversed in just 4 months. In the next three months, transactions topped the 7 billion mark in a month. In another four months’ time, the platform processed 8 billion transactions a month.

UPI has become synonymous with digital payments in India. It has emerged as the most popular and preferred payment mode in the country, pioneering Person to Person (P2P) as well as Person to Merchant (P2M) transactions, accounting for 75 per cent of the total digital payments.

Recently the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Shaktikanta Das said that the platform has the bandwidth to process one billion transactions per day. UPI, on average, processes about 30 crore transactions a day currently.

According to NPCI, 99.9 per cent of the transactions on the UPI platform are account–to–account transfers. RBI has now allowed linking RuPay credit cards to UPI and merchant payments through prepaid instruments (PPIs) on the UPI guard rails. With these additions to UPI, customers now have a choice of using bank accounts, RuPay credit cards, and PPIs on UPI-enabled apps. This is expected to aid the volume of transactions on the platform.