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Tag: Daily UPI Transactions

  • UPI Heads to Africa: NPCI Signs Landmark Deal with Namibia’s Central Bank

    In order to create a real-time payments platform similar to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the Namibian central bank and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) have inked a licensing deal.

    According to Dammu Ravi, secretary in the external affairs ministry, during a press briefing on the outcomes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the African nation, NPCI and the Namibian central bank have signed a licensing agreement to implement UPI in Namibia for real-time payments, making it the first country of its kind in the world.

    Namibia would be able to create a real-time payment system thanks to the agreement. Notably, more than a year ago, the Bank of Namibia and NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), the organisation’s international arm, originally inked a deal to create a digital payments system.

    India Agrees for Transfer-of-Technology

    As part of the collaboration, the NPCI committed to providing the Bank of Namibia with technology and other knowledge to aid in the creation of a digital payments system. In an effort to boost UPI use globally, the NPCI has inked agreements with a number of nations.

    The NIPL and Trinidad and Tobago’s ministry of digital transformation collaborated on the same project in September of last year. Before that, it was negotiating with South American and African nations to assist them in developing digital payment systems such as the UPI.

    The UAE’s Network International and the NPCI joined in July 2024 to enable Indian tourists to use UPI at a number of locations throughout the Gulf country. As a result, a number of nations, including France, the United Arab Emirates, Bhutan, Nepal, and Singapore, now accept UPI payments.

    UPI Expanding its Nexus

    The NPCI is still working to expand UPI in order to reach its daily goal of one billion transactions.

    In order to facilitate UPI payments through smart devices such as wearables, connected cars, and smart applications, the payments body is developing an Internet of Things version of the real-time payment system.

    Last month, there were 18.40 billion UPI transactions, totalling INR 24.04 lakh crore. For India’s fintech infrastructure, the recent collaboration with Namibia is undoubtedly a significant victory.

    The UPI system, which has been praised for being accessible to all societal levels in India, is now beginning its global expansion and creating opportunities for other countries to follow.

    Johannes Gawaxab, the governor of Namibia’s central bank, had earlier underlined that the goal of implementing UPI is to guarantee the deployment of a safe and effective national payment system in Namibia in addition to promoting financial inclusion and reducing reliance on cash.

  • UPI Slips Slightly: Transactions Dip to 18.40 Billion in June

    Transactions using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) fell slightly to 18.40 billion in June from an all-time high of 18.68 billion the month before. Compared to the previous year, the number of transactions increased by 32%.

    Compared to the 17.89 billion transactions that were reported in April, the number of transactions in the month under review is 2.9% greater. According to data made public by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI transactions totalled INR 24.04 Lakh Cr in June, a 4.4% decrease from the INR 25.14 Lakh Cr transactions that were reported the month before.

     In contrast, the average daily transaction count increased from 602 million in May to 613 million in June. In addition, INR 80,131 Cr was the average daily transaction value.

    India Leading the Global Digital Payment Race

    India is currently working on improving UPI’s efficiency, even though it is already at the forefront of the digital payment race and helping other countries to catch up.

     According to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who was speaking at the Digital Payments Award 2025, India currently makes up 48.5% of the world’s real-time digital payments, and the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) ecosystem has over 35 Cr users. She added that a few merchant shops in seven countries, including Bhutan, Nepal, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, the UAE, Singapore and France, currently accept UPI.

    The NPCI implemented new rules last month to speed up the processing of UPI payments. Remitter banks, beneficiary banks, and payer and payee payment service providers (PSPs) have been instructed to cut the response time for UPI APIs started by the NPCI to as little as 10 seconds for specific transactions in accordance with the new regulations.

    Speculations on MDR

    The government may impose a merchant discount rate (MDR) on UPI transactions exceeding INR 3,000, according to a report. The finance ministry, however, denied the allegations and referred to the study as hypothetical, unfounded, and deceptive.

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a letter earlier this year from the Payment Councils of India (PCI) urging him to reevaluate the 0% MDR policy for RuPay and UPI transactions.

    Ministry further stated that nation’s people are unnecessarily apprehensive, afraid, and suspicious as a result of such sensational and unfounded rumours. The government is still totally committed to encouraging digital payments through UPI.

    When banks or payment service providers handle digital transactions through UPI, they charge merchants a fee known as the MDR. To encourage digital payments across the nation, the price was reduced to zero in 2020. However, many people think that the lack of MDR has tempered interest in making additional investments in digital infrastructure.

  • Disaster Recovery Drill Backfires? PhonePe Hit by UPI Outage

    Due to a network capacity shortage brought on by cybersecurity exercises held in the wake of the India-Pakistan conflict, fintech giant PhonePe had an outage on 12 May when it came to processing Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions.

    For more than an hour on the same day, users and industry stakeholders reported that the PhonePe app was unable to access India’s real-time payments system, UPI.

    The disruption happened when the Bengaluru-based company started using a new data centre to process all of its transactions for disaster recovery (DR) exercises. Transaction problems were caused by a network capacity deficiency that was revealed by a larger amount of UPI transactions on Monday night.

    Drills were Part of Cybersecurity Measures

    The purpose of the drills was to test the network firewall’s cybersecurity features. According to Rahul Chari, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of PhonePe, the company started active disaster recovery drills at PhonePe with increased cybersecurity measures on its network firewall because of the conflict’s intensification last week.

    A new data centre was handling all of the firm’s traffic that evening across all of its services. Sadly, a network capacity shortage was revealed by 12 May night’s peak traffic, which caused transactions to begin failing. The confrontation between India and Pakistan was followed by these active drills.

     For the payments network to operate smoothly in such cases, stronger cybersecurity precautions are needed. A top industry executive went on to say that the disruption was exclusive to PhonePe and that there was no downtime on the UPI network itself.

    Paytm Became the Front-Runner

    Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Paytm, claimed in a post on the social media site X that on May 12, the Noida-based company’s application was operating without hiccups and handling twice as many transactions as usual.

    Paytm’s UPI payments are operating without a hitch, Sharma continued. The Paytm app is operational at twice the usual volume. Users experienced four disruptions in recent weeks when attempting to process UPI transactions in March and April.

    In an effort to lessen these interruptions, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) released two circulars last month that included application programming interface (API) recommendations. While the second circular provides guidance on how to stop the abuse of APIs related to real-time payments, the first circular concentrates on decreasing response times for four APIs.

    With over 864 crore transactions handled in March—nearly half of all UPI traffic—PhonePe was the leader of the UPI ecosystem. Google Pay came next, although Paytm is still widely used, especially by local merchants and small companies, despite having a lower volume.

    This most recent issue coincides with government efforts to encourage small sellers to use UPI, including a INR 1,500 crore incentive programme for BHIM app ecosystem usage.

  • UPI Collect Call Transactions will be Phased Out by NPCI

    To combat growing online fraud, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) plans to gradually phase out collect phone transactions for merchant payments on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). By lowering the possibility of illegal fund withdrawals, this ruling attempts to minimise fraudulent transactions in which retailers ask for payments from clients. Through their UPI app, retailers can begin payment requests that customers confirm through a collect call transaction, commonly referred to as a pull payment. However, scammers are increasingly using this technique to trick customers into approving illegal payments by fabricating websites or businesses. In order to improve security, NPCI is concentrating on push transactions, which lower the chance of fraud by allowing users to initiate payments on their own by manually entering merchant information or scanning QR codes.

    Significant Shifts in UPI Transactions as Collect Call Payments Fall

    In February 2025 alone, UPI processed 16 billion transactions, 10 billion of which were merchant payments, making it the most popular digital payment mechanism in India. UPI transactions have increased by 46% in the last year, from 117.7 billion in 2023 to 172.2 billion in 2024. Notwithstanding this expansion, collect call transactions—in which retailers ask clients for money—are declining in frequency. Direct UPI connections through payment service providers are becoming more popular among big organisations and e-commerce platforms. According to industry experts, collect phone transactions currently account for fewer than 3% of all merchant payments. Peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions are less common because NPCI has already capped pull transactions at INR 2,000 per request.

    Additionally, less than 3% of all UPI payments are made using these transactions, indicating a move towards safer payment systems where users start the transfer on their own. Banks are currently advocating for the reinstatement of the Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on RuPay and UPI debit card transactions due to modifications in UPI security. To encourage the use of UPI, MDR, a nominal fee assessed to companies for handling digital payments, was previously eliminated. MDR may have an impact on small firms that presently benefit from free digital payments if it is reinstated, perhaps raising the cost of UPI transactions for them. In order to ensure the security of UPI payments, NPCI is developing new methods to check businesses as collect call transactions become outdated. The specifics of these new regulations are still being worked out, but they may force banks and payment service providers to perform more stringent background checks on companies.

    India Sees a Sharp Increase in Digital Payment Fraud

    Digital payment fraud has grown significantly, according to data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which shows a dramatic rise in scam instances. According to a Business Standard report, 13,133 fraud instances involving cards and digital banking were registered in the first half of FY25, resulting in losses of INR 514 crore. Over 29,000 occurrences of digital banking scams occurred in FY24, and scammers stole an incredible INR 1,457 crore. By deceiving clients into approving payments for services or goods that do not exist, fraudsters frequently take advantage of pull transactions. Many smaller retailers continue to evade know-your-customer (KYC) verification, which makes fraud easier to carry out, in contrast to major online retailers like Flipkart and Amazon, which interface with regulated payment aggregators like PhonePe and Paytm.

  • In Few Months, RBI Anticipates that Daily UPI Transactions Would Reach 1 billion

    According to Governor Shaktikanta Das, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) anticipates that the number of daily Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions will surpass one billion in the coming months from the current 500 million transactions per day.

    Das stated during a panel discussion at the Group of Thirty’s Annual International Banking Seminar in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2024, that the RBI will not make a hasty announcement about a nationwide rollout of the central bank of digital currency (CBDC) because it wants to carry out extensive testing and be completely certain about its design, robustness, and security before thinking about a wider rollout.

    The payments system is now much more efficient thanks to UPI. Approximately 500 million transactions are made over UPI every day. “We are trying to step it up further and the idea is to reach a billion transactions, may be in the next few months,” Das stated.

    What National Payments Corporation of India’s Data Reveals?

    According to data from the National Payments Corporation of India, the average number of transactions per day increased from 483 million in August to above 500 million in September. UPI handled 15.04 billion transactions in September 2024, totalling INR 20.64 lakh crore.

    The RBI is working to integrate UPI with more nations’ payment systems. In fact, UPI has a lot of potential for international payments. According to Das, the RBI has also taken the initiative to connect India’s UPI with other nations’ quick payment systems.

    Seven Countries Using UPI For Transactions

    Seven nations presently provide UPI: France, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and Nepal.

    Regarding the e-rupee, the governor stated that the RBI will implement the CBDC nationwide in a phased manner. Cross-border payments represent the CBDC’s greatest potential. Through the removal of numerous middlemen, CBDC can enable quick, easy, and inexpensive cross-border money transactions.

    On November 1, 2022, the RBI began the first CBDC trial phase for wholesale transactions of government securities. A month later, on December 1, the RBI began the pilot for retail transactions.

    Current Performance of UPI in India

    PhonePe is the most popular UPI app in terms of volume and value contribution, followed by Google Pay and Paytm. However, according to a report by payment technology service provider Worldline, the average ticket size (ATS) of UPI transactions decreased by 8%. According to the report, the average ticket size (ATS) for all UPI transactions was INR 1,603 in the first half of 2023 and fell to INR 1,478 in the first half of 2024.

     P2P (person-to-person) and P2M (person-to-merchant) transactions make up ATS. In P2P transactions, ATS saw an almost constant increase from INR 2,812 to INR 2,836 year over year. The amount of ATS for P2M transactions decreased by 4%, from INR 667 to INR 643.

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    StartupTalkyNitin Konde