Paytm claims that over 5 million offline merchants are now accepting payments through Unified Payments Interface (UPI), reports the Economic Times. Paytm's total base is 9 million offline merchants. Consequently, Paytm said that offline transactions on its UPI platform accounted for more than 40% of its overall UPI transactions. According to Paytm, this spike was due to a 'widespread adoption of digital payments' in organised electronic retail outlets, high-end fashion and departmental stores, where customers preferred paying via UPI for large value payments. According to the report, Bengaluru and Hyderabad had the largest share of UPI transactions on Paytm, followed by Delhi, Pune and Mumbai. This announcement comes days after the UPI saw an increase of 32% in the total transaction volumes taking place between July and August 2018. A total of 312.02 million transactions, amounting to Rs 54,212.26 crore were carried out during the month, compared with 235.7 million transactions worth Rs 45,845.64 crore in July, data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) showed. The number of transactions on UPI were largely expected to drop in August owing to the NPCI’s directive to ban same account payments, where the source and destination of the payment is the same bank account. That apart, the government's decision to withdraw multiple incentives for both, merchants and customers for making transactions through UPI was also expected to have a negative impact on the popular payments service. However, to everyone’s surprise, the number of transactions saw a massive surge, crossing the 300-million mark for the first time. This was largely attributed to the launch of UPI…
