The Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) UPI app saw a transaction volume of 2.49 million for the month of March and transactions worth Rs 823.1 crore. UPI transactions stood at 6.2 million in March but the value of these transactions were Rs 2,390 crore. Thus, BHIM processed 40.16% of all UPI transactions and accounted for 34.44% of the value of transactions in March. This was a 24.85% increase from 1.97 million BHIM transactions in February. The value of these transactions stood at Rs 623.145 crore. Currently, BHIM is live on 44 banks and has seen over 20.6 million downloads as of April 10. However, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which developed BHIM, does not give information on the number of virtual payment addresses (VPAs) created and the number of accounts linked to the UPI. ICICI Bank, the largest private sector bank in India, now has more than 3 million VPAs generated from its mobile applications and has acquired UPI 110,000 merchants through its EazyPay application. The NPCI doesn't give data on how many merchants are on the UPI. Meanwhile, YES Bank which is developing an ecosystem of UPI apps, says it has over 20 million downloads from partner apps. This includes Flipkart's PhonePe wallet which crossed 10 million downloads in January, as indicated by this BusinessLine report. Remember that banks are allowed to charge merchants a higher fee than compared to P2P payments on the UPI. The merchant discount rate (MDR) — the fee borne by the seller to provide services—is…
