Indian government’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) has welcomed the new year by touting the record-high Unified Payment Interface (UPI) payments in December 2022. With 7.82 billion UPI transactions worth ₹ 12,82,055 crore ($154,533 million) reported by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), DFS shared the news as a “major contribution” to digital payments in India. https://twitter.com/DFS_India/status/1609844313336451073 But, did you know? While the number of UPI transactions continue to double annually, the growth of the value of these transactions slowed down this year. Earlier, when MediaNama had looked at UPI data from July 2020, and July, 2021, it was observed that the UPI transactions had more than doubled over the course of 12 months with a 2.1x increase in value. Following this trend, it was expected that both the transactions and the value of transactions should double or more with each year. However, transactions only went from 4.56 billion in December, 2021 to 7.82 billion transactions in December 2022. Worse still, while the transactions were valued at ₹ 8,26,848.22 crore ($99,665 million) in December, 2021, the monthly value of December, 2022 transactions stood at ₹12,82,055 crore ($1,54,533 million) – half of the previous year’s figure. Breaking down the data Best performer of 2022: While not as impressive as last year, December, 2022 recorded more transactions than November, 2022 with a margin of 520 million transactions. Similarly, the value of transactions also went from ₹ 11,90,593 crore ($1,43,509 million) in November to ₹ 12,82,055 crore ($1,54,533 million) in December. [caption…
