 "Paytm")
Fintech major Paytm continued to see a dip in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions for the third consecutive month in April, data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shows.
In April this year, the company processed 1,117.13 million transactions, a 9 per cent month-on-month decline in volume from 1,230.04 million transactions handled in March.
Consequently, the company has seen a contraction in its market share in the UPI ecosystem.
The company cornered 8.4 per cent market share in the UPI applications’ ecosystem in April. The share has come down from 10.8 per cent and 9.13 per cent in February and March, respectively.
However, the Noida-based company has continued to retain its spot as the third largest player in the ecosystem because other players are considerably smaller in comparison to the fintech major.
For instance, Cred, which finds itself in the fourth position on the UPI transaction charts, is a much smaller player as compared to Paytm.
In April this year, Cred processed 138.46 million transactions, whereas Paytm handled 1,117.13 million transactions, indicating that Cred's transaction volume is at least eight times lower than that of Paytm.
Meanwhile, the top two players, PhonePe and Google Pay, processed 6,500 million and 5,027.3 million transactions, respectively, in April. Their share in the overall transaction numbers was pegged at 48.8 per cent and 37.8 per cent, respectively.
Both the companies have seen their share of UPI transactions inch up after the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) action on Paytm’s associate entity Paytm Payments Bank.
In February 2024, Walmart-owned PhonePe held a share of 47.3 per cent in overall transaction volumes. Meanwhile, Google Pay had a share of 36.7 per cent the same month.
As other major UPI apps gain traction, Paytm has seen a silver lining after NPCI allowed the fintech firm to function as a third-party application provider (TPAP) in March this year.
Following which in the last month, the NPCI allowed Paytm to start migration of users to new payment service provider (PSP) bank handles.
These four banks — State Bank of India (SBI), Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, and YES Bank — now act as PSPs to Paytm.
Business Standard had earlier reported that Paytm would continue to see a decline in the volume of transactions processed on UPI since the company cannot add new users until the existing ones are migrated to a new handle.
This came after the RBI’s crippling restrictions on Paytm Payments Bank.
