By completing 10 billion UPI transactions worth more than Rs 15,000 billion for the very first time in August, India set a new record. This is a significant turning point in India’s seven-year digital development. According to figures from the National Payments Corporation of India, a total of 10.24 billion digital transactions totaling over Rs 15,184 billion (more than $183 billion) in value were carried out over UPI up until August 30 in a nation of 135 crore people. The August total still needs one more day of calculation to be recorded.
The 10.24 billion figure represents an increase of nearly 2 billion over the world’s population. This comes after India almost reached the 10-billion-transaction threshold in July when it recorded 9.96 billion transactions via UPI. The August number has increased by almost 52% year over year since August 2022, when there were approximately 6.5 billion UPI transactions recorded nationwide. Only 3.5 billion transactions were made in August 2021, indicating an increase of over three times in just two years.
On August 30, data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which manages the real-time payments network, indicated that the mobile payments behemoth known as the unified payments interface (UPI) probably crossed the 15 billion transaction threshold for the very first time.
9.96 billion transactions were made through the use of the UPI in July.
Although the NPCI has not yet released figures for August 31, UPI transactions reached 10.24 billion on August 30. Around 330 million transactions per day were processed using UPI in the month of August. With that flow rate, UPI reached approximately 15.5 billion transactions in August, an increase of 5% from the previous month.
The most recent figure of over 10 billion transactions in August marks a record in the use of UPI, an approach that India is now making available to other countries. This is the overwhelming volume of people using UPI that is connected to their bank accounts to send money to other people or scanning QR codes at the neighbourhood’s top coffee shops and “sabziwala thelas. More than 35 nations currently seek to embrace India’s UPI technology in order to make it available to Indian tourists and foreign residents overseas. Japan is one of the countries that has shown interest in implementing UPI.
According to experts, India’s digital wallet transactions may soon surpass cash transactions, according to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s comments from earlier this year.
This would be a significant improvement over the UPI-BHIM introduction in 2016 under the Narendra Modi administration. After the 2016–17 demonetization, consumers began to use digital payments much more frequently and stopped carrying cash. A senior government official had previously stated in the press that “this became even more evident and helpful during the COVID period between 2020 and 2022.”
According to a source, “the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in India saw transaction volumes likely surpass the historic 10-billion barrier in August, marking a critical turning point in the country’s payments history”.
Somewhat over three years after beginning its operations in 2016, UPI finally reached 1 billion transactions per month in October 2019. After another 12 months, it reached 2.1 billion monthly transactions in October 2020, followed by 3 billion and more in July 2021, and so forth until it reached 9 billion monthly transactions in May 2023.