The coronavirus crisis and lockdown led to UPI payments volume declining sharply by 19.8% in April 2020 over the previous month, and slumping to just below 1 billion transactions in April. This was per data published by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The total amount transacted via UPI reduced by 26.8% to Rs 151,140.7 crore. NPCI is a private body owned by public sector and private banks in India, it owns and operates important payments systems such as UPI and IMPS. Some observations 1. The number of transactions and amount transacted declined sharply in April 2020. As a result, transactions per day decreased for the second consecutive time to 33.3 million per day from 40.2 million in the previous month. 2. The number of transactions declined by 247.3 million in March, and the total amount transacted also went down by Rs 55,321.7 crores. In the previous month (March 2020), the number of transactions decreased by 76.4 million and the amount transacted went down by Rs 15,333 crores. 3. The average amount per transaction decreased by 9%, to Rs 1,512 for April 2020, though it has remained largely flat since November 2019, and has remained above Rs 1,500 since a year now (since April 2019). 4. A total of 153 banks were operational on in April 2020.
