UPI Makes Record: Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions have reached yet another milestone in May, new data from the National Payments Corporation of India, or NPCI, showed. As per the data, India’s flagship digital payment platform UPI has broken yet another record by processing transactions worth more than Rs 10 lakh crore. This is the first time the UPI platform has processed as large transaction amounts.
As per data available on the NPCI website, UPI transactions worth Rs 10,41,506.60 crore has been done in the month of May. A record volume of 5,955.09 million transactions have been logged, as per the data with NPCI. On a year-on-year basis, the volume of UPI transactions has jumped by a whooping 117 per cent, while the amount of UPI transaction processed has doubled as compared to May 2021. Meanwhile, on the month-on-month basis, the volume of transactions was up 6.63 per cent. The value of transactions jumped 5.91 per cent as compared to April this year, the data showed.
The UPI platform was launched by the government backed NPCI in 2016, and has seen wide acceptance across India ever since. The mode of payment saw a spur of popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic which hit India in march 2020, when online payment methods were being encouraged to promote contactless transactions. During March 2020, the number of UPI transactions was at 124 crore amounting to Rs 2.06 lakh crore.
What is UPI?
“Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a system that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application (of any participating bank), merging several banking features, seamless fund routing & merchant payments into one hood. It also caters to the “Peer to Peer” collect request which can be scheduled and paid as per requirement and convenience,” says the NPCI website.
UPI enables immediate money transfer through mobile device round the clock 24×7 and 365 days, while using a single mobile application for accessing different bank accounts.
Record Breaking Moments for UPI
In financial year 2022, UPI transactions crossed the watershed mark $1 trillion as per data from NCPI. According to the data, the value of UPI transactions for the year added up to Rs 83.45 trillion, which is roughly $1 trillion. NPCI is now aiming for daily UPI transactions worth R$1 billion over the next two to three years. It is the single largest retail payments systems in the country in terms of volume of transactions, indicating its wide acceptance.
This would be facilitated by recent announcements made by the Reserve Bank of India. On March 9 this year, the central bank launched a facility whereby you don’t need a smartphone or internet connection to do UPI payments. The UPI123Pay system, announced by the RBI is being tested, while NPCI has announced UPILite which makes it possible to use the facility in the offline mode.
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