PhonePe leads UPI payments with over 970 mn transactions in February

The Walmart-owned firm, which competes with Google Pay, Paytm and Amazon Pay, now processes some 1.07 billion monthly transactions across UPI, cards and wallets

Walmart-owned PhonePe said that it continues to be the digital payments market leader in February, processing over 970 million UPI (unified payments interface) transactions, and over 1.07 billion total transactions across UPI, cards and wallets. PhonePe said this growth is an indication of strong user preference on the back of the highest end-to-end success rates on UPI payments, and its superior product experience.

PhonePe competes with players such as Google Pay, Paytm and Amazon Pay. The firm said it processed more than a billion transactions for the third consecutive month in February and continues to lead the digital payments market across UPI, credit and debit card and wallets in India.  The growth has come on the back of the rapid expansion it has seen in offline payments across tier 2, tier 3 cities, having already digitized over 17.5 million kiranas. The company had previously announced its plans to digitize 25 million kiranas by the end of 2021.

“We are delighted to retain our pole position as the top digital payments platform in the country,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and CEO of PhonePe. “I am very proud to report that PhonePe is leading across all core industry metrics - active users, active merchant, total transactions and TPV (total payments volume). We will continue to transform lives positively while building simple, scalable and innovative products for every Indian.’’

PhonePe recently crossed the 275-million registered user milestone. It had over 100 million monthly active users generating over 1 billion digital payment transactions in January alone. It is targeting to surpass 500-million registered users by December 2022. During a recent meeting with the investment community, Nigam said the company’s annualised TPV (total payment volume) run-rate has crossed $300 billion. “We hope to become India's most comprehensive financial services platform,” he said.

This week, PhonePe’s rival Paytm said it has breached 1.2-billion monthly transactions, led by huge growth in its offline payment and financial services. The Paytm platform allows all payment methods, including wallets, UPI, cards, and net banking. The company also said it was seeing 15 per cent month-on-month growth in offline merchant payments.