Second Month In Row, Walmart's PhonePe Logs Over 1 Billion Transactions

For two consecutive months, Wal­mart-backed PhonePe has processed more than a billion transactions on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

It maintained its top position in the pecking order of UPI apps, followed by Google Pay. In April, PhonePe processed 1.18 billion transactions on its platform amounting to Rs 2.34 trillion, thereby capturing more than 45 per cent market share in terms of volume of transactions on UPI.

In March, it had processed 1.19 billion transactions amounting to Rs 2.31 trillion.

On the other hand, Google Pay registered 905.96 million transactions in the same period, amounting to Rs 1.9 trillion, thus capturing a market share of 34.3 per cent in the UPI space.

Last month, it had processed over 957 million transactions worth Rs 2.01 trillion.

The drop in transactions processed by PhonePe and Google Pay in April is in sync with the fall seen in UPI and various other digital payment platforms during the month. Retail digital payments saw a dip in April after a rise in Covid infections resulted in lockdown-like situations in many parts of the country. UPI saw a 4.3 per cent dip in transaction volume and a 2.22 per cent dip in transaction value.

Among other large players in the UPI apps space, Paytm Payments Bank processed 320.78 million transactions in April, amounting to Rs 36,859.20 crore. It has a market share of 12 per cent in the UPI space as far as volume of transactions processed is concerned.

WhatsApp, the new entrant in the UPI space, has not seen a huge jump in transactions processed through its platform since its launch. The amount of transactions processed through its platform has hovered around a little over 0.50 million transactions a month for the last three consecutive months.

E-commerce giant Amazon’s payment application Amazon Pay processed 49.12 million transactions in April worth Rs 4,272.47 crore.

“PhonePe continued to gain share in UPI transaction volumes. Google Pay and Paytm both lost some share and accounted for 33.5 per cent and 14 per cent of the transaction volumes, respectively, in April. WhatsApp volumes continue to be sluggish, at 0.2 per cent share, and hasn't progressed as expected at the time of its much-awaited launch,” said Shishir Mankad, managing partner and head - financial services, Praxis Global Alliance.

A little over a month ago, NPCI came out with guidelines on capping the volume of transactions that third-party application providers (TPAPs) or UPI apps can process on the UPI. NPCI had said that the volume of transactions that TPAPs can process on the UPI platform should not exceed 30 per cent, during the preceding three months, on a rolling basis, effective January 2021. Also, existing players with higher market share, in terms of volume of transactions, such as the likes of PhonePe and Google Pay, will have an additional two years to comply with the directives.

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