To Download MediaNama's free Digital Payments In India report, Feb 2018 edition, click here. The Unified Payment Interface (UPI) saw an increase of 13% in the total transaction volumes taking place between January and February 2018, according to data published by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The NPCI is a private company owned by Indian banks, and owns and operates payments systems such as UPI and IMPS. The total number of transactions in February 2018 were around 39.8 times higher than in the same month last year. The amount transacted increased by 23% to Rs 19,126.2 crores over January 2018. The amount transacted in February 2018 was 10 times higher than in the corresponding month last year. In February, the number of transactions and amount transacted occurred per day, as a result, were at their highest peak. Some observations: 1. UPI transactions have been growing since launch. There appears to have been a hockey-stick effect that has taken place in the last five months. Note that Google Tez launched on September 18, 2017, and had reported 140 million transactions for the month of October and November since launch, apart from 12 million users. If you look at UPI transactions on a per day basis for each month, there has been a continuous increase, as indicated in the chart below. However, the increase in the number of transactions should be taken with a pinch of salt as PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam pointed out that these are artificial as most…
