Unified Payments Interface (UPI)

The recent analysis by RBI and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and some industry players, from April 2018 to March 2019 shows that UPI platform outperforming e-wallets in terms of the value of transactions done.

share this post:

Why is it in the news?

  • The recent analysis by RBI and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and some industry players, from April 2018 to March 2019 shows that UPI platform outperforming e-wallets in terms of the value of transactions done.
  • The UPI is also eating away at e-wallets’ market share in specific areas such as person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions.

More in the news

Findings:
    • Payments made on the UPI platform saw a remarkable growth of over 400% in the April to March period.
    • UPI is completely interoperable and as such, it is unique in the world, where you have an interoperable system on the ‘send’ and ‘receive’ side.
    • That is, you can send money from different accounts in different banks and receive it in different accounts in different banks.
    • UPI Vs e-wallet:
      (1) The rapid growth of UPI is accompanied by a reasonably strong growth in the value of transactions done using e-wallets.
      (2) However, the e-wallet’s growth has not taken off much following the fillip it received in the aftermath of demonetisation in November 2016.
      (3) E-wallets accounted for 6.3% of all customer payments made to merchants in 2017-18 and UPI accounted for just 1.6%.
      (4) In 2018-19, the share of e-wallet transactions fell to 1.87% and the share of UPI rose to 17%.
      • However, others argued that the size of the digital payments market in India was such that various instruments could exist without really eating into each other’s market share.
      • Debit Vs Credit card:
        (1) Debit cards are far more popular than credit cards as can be seen from the fact that the value of debit card transactions stood at ₹3.05 lakh crore in February 2019.

      Source

      The Hindu.