With 94 mn transactions in July, PhonePe claims leadership in UPI payments

Flipkart-owned digital payments service PhonePe claims it has become the largest player on India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI) network, edging out rivals such as Paytm, Google’s Tez and the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) BHIM payments apps.

The company on Wednesday said that it had cornered 40 per cent of all transactions on the UPI network, amounting to around 94 million in the month of July. This also helped the company cross the 100 million overall monthly transactions milestone for the first time.

While PhonePe is predominantly a UPI payments service, it also supports other forms of digital payments.

“The PhonePe platform has witnessed incredible transaction volume growth over the past few months. Our market share of UPI transactions has jumped to 40% in July. This is validation that, for genuine consumers, PhonePe is their preferred UPI app of choice,” said Sameer Nigam, co-founder and CEO of PhonePe, in a statement.

On Wednesday, the NPCI which runs the UPI said that the volume of transactions on the network in the month of July stood at 235.65 million, down from 246.37 million in June. The NPCI clarified that this reduction was on account of excluding transactions that were debited and credited to the same account, which was done starting in the month of July.

The total value of transactions being processed by the UPI network, however, grew to Rs 458.45 billion in July, from Rs 408.34 billion in the previous month. 

Nigam added that one of the reasons why PhonePe was able to corner a larger share of UPI transactions was due to NPCI’s move to stop counting transactions which were originating and ending from the same bank account. This he claimed was being done by companies to artificially inflate their UPI numbers, but he did not name the company.

PhonePe had crossed the 100 million user mark last month and says that it powers over 70 per cent of the merchant transactions on the UPI network. This even earned the company the award for “Outstanding Merchant UPI Player” from the NPCI earlier this year.

So far the company says it has built a network of 300,000 online and offline merchants where each of its 100 million-odd customers can pay for products and services digitally. It also allows customers to recharge their mobile plans, pay DTH bills and even make payments for utilities such as electricity, water and gas.