Recent technological advancements and the digital awareness campaign in India have resulted in Unified Payments Interface(UPI) growth continuously. In the last month of 2020, UPI has crossed 2.23 Billion transactions. A major development came in terms of the value of these transactions. For the first time in the UPI history, Rs 4.16 Trillion value is exchanged through UPI.
Compare to November 2020, there is a 1% increment in the total volume of transactions and a 6.4% increment in amount-wise transactions.
UPI was introduced on 11 April 2016 by Dr. Raghuram Rajan, Ex-Governor, Reserve Bank of India. Respective banks started uploading their UPI enabled apps on Google Play Store and iOS Store on 25th August 2016 for customer use.
UPI started its operational journey from the month of July 2016. In that month, UPI had 90 thousand transactions of Rs 38 lakhs. Initially, 21 banks adopted the UPI system. Currently, 207 banks are live on UPI.
UPI is operated under the banner of the National Payments Corporation of India(NPCI). It is an initiative of the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks’ Association(IBA).
Setup in 2008, NPCI is a non-profit organization. Other than UPI, it started other initiatives like RuPay Card, Bharat Bill Payment System, National Electric Toll Collection, Aadhar Payment Bridge System, Immediate Payment Service, etc.
Some media portals were flashing news from the last few months that from 1 January 2021 onwards, there will be service charges on the transactions done through UPI payments. Yesterday, NPCI clarified that there will be no service charges on transactions done through UPI.
UPI features like Immediate money transfer 24×7 and 365 days, 2 factors authentication, utility bills service, Single Mobile Application for multiple accounts, donations, collections, etc are going to attract more users in the future.
Google Play and PhonePe handle around 80% of UPI transactions. As per the November month report, Google pay had the largest market share with 960 million transactions followed by PhonePe’s 868 Million.
NPCI has allowed a new entry Whatsapp Pay for UPI transactions. Launched in early November, Whatsapp Pay recorded 3.1 lakhs UPI transactions of approximately Rs 14 crore.
Online security and privacy is still a major concern for customers. People are being cheated online through different methods. UPI users have to be more careful while using the UPI system to avoid cyber fraud.
