The number of transactions on the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) UPI app was 16.9 million for the month of August 2019, up 5.5% from 16 million last month. The total value of the transactions stood at Rs 6,132 crore, up marginally from Rs 6,121.7 crore over July, according to data provided by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). NPCI is a bank-owned organization that runs the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). In May 2019, the Economic Times reported that Google Pay reported 240 million transactions, Flipkart-owned PhonePe reported around 230 million, and Alibaba owned Paytm reported 200 million in transactions. There is no data available on WhatsApp payments regarding its ongoing pilot. There were 918.4 million UPI transactions in August 2019, with Rs 154,504.9 crore being transacted. Thus, BHIM processed only 1.8% of all UPI transactions and accounted for 4% of the amount transacted in August. In the previous month, BHIM had accounted for 2% of all UPI transactions and processed 4.2% of the amount transacted. Currently, BHIM is live on 117 banks, gradually increased as compared to the previous month, and has seen over 45.5 million app downloads. However, the 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. In terms of net additions, the number of transactions for BHIM grew by 0.88 million in August 2019 – the highest addition was in March 2019 – while the total amount transacted…
