Flipkart-owned PhonePe became the leading UPI application in India during December 2020, overtaking the previous leader Google Pay. According to the data released by NPCI, a total of 207 banks are now live on UPI. NPCI said that a whopping 2,234.16 million transactions accounting for 4,16,176.21 crore took place in December. To recall, UPI recorded 2,210.23 million transactions in November and the same is almost the same in December. However, the overall transaction value stood at 3,90,999.15 crore in November. This is not the first time we are seeing PhonePe beating Google Pay in the UPI market, but the road is getting more challenging for the latter. Facebook-owned WhatsApp doubled its UPI transactions volume to 0.81 million with transactions value worth Rs 29.72 crore.
WhatsApp Doubles UPI Transactions Volume
WhatsApp rolled out full-fledged payments service based on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in November 2020. During the same month, the platform managed to clock just 0.31 million UPI transactions volume and Rs 13.87 crore transactions value. In December 2020, WhatsApp increased the numbers to 0.81 million transactions volume and Rs 29.71 crore value. That said, this is still a below-par performance from WhatsApp considering the massive user base it is having in India. PhonePe topped the chart in the last month of 2020 with a record 902.02 million transactions volume and a whopping Rs 182,126.88 crore value. Google Pay is second on the chart with 854.49 million transactions worth Rs 176,199.33 crore. Google Pay’s monthly volume growth rate is reduced, whereas the same for PhonePe increased. In recent times, we have seen a lot of consumers complaining about Google Pay and its services. The main highlight of UPI is instant money transfer facility. Several users complained that Google Pay is holding the funds for a while before transferring them to the recipient’s bank account. Thanks to this, PhonePe is gaining new customers and also increasing the UPI transactions volume. In November, PhonePe had 868.40 million transactions, and the number increased to 902.02 million in December. PhonePe will likely see improvement in overall UPI transactions volume in January 2020. As you can see, Google Pay and PhonePe together have a market share of more than 40%. According to the new NPCI norms, the two UPI apps will have to reduce their share to less than 30% by 2024.
