UPI transactions cross 600 million in December
NEWDELHI: Monthly transactions through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) crossed the 600-million mark for the first time in December, data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) showed on Tuesday.
Under UPI, 620.17 million transactions with a total value of ₹1,02,594.82 crore were carried out during the month. This is an 18% increase in transaction volume compared with the 524.94 million transactions worth ₹82,232.21 crore in November, when monthly UPI transactions crossed 500 million for the first time.
UPI is a payments system launched by NPCI, the umbrella organization for all retail payments in the country. It facilitates instant fund transfer between two bank accounts on a mobile platform, without requiring any details of the beneficiary’s bank account.
Transactions through UPI received a major boost after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) app on December 30, 2016. The transactions conducted through the BHIM platform in December have not been updated by NPCI on its website. Over the last few months, NPCI has introduced several measures to curb fake transactions and regulating fintech companies so that they do not inflate their UPI numbers.
The corporation had asked banks to stop transactions originating from different UPI applications with the debit and the credit happening in the same account from August 1. It also put a cap, allowing only 10 peer-to-peer transactions per bank in a span of 24 hours. Over the last one year, there has been a more than 300% rise in UPI volumes and the trend is expected to continue. On August 16, NPCI launched UPI 2.0, an upgraded version of UPI with several new features, including an overdraft facility enabling customers to link their overdraft accounts to UPI.
A one-time feature allowing customers to pre-authorise a transaction and pay at a later date, and the invoice-in-thebox feature allowing customers to check the invoice sent by merchants before making a payment were also introduced. The signed intent and QR feature enables customers to check the authenticity of merchants while scanning the QR code. However, fintech firms are still not allowed to use the UPI 2.0 platform, with confusion over the usage of Aadhaar-linked features following the SC’S verdict.