BHIM's UPI volumes grow five-fold, market share inches closer to 1%

Government-backed payments app processes 172 million UPI transactions in January, overtakes Cred and Amazon Pay on leaderboard

Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) has gradually moved up to become the sixth-largest UPI app on the real-time payments system’s leaderboard, overtaking major third-party apps such as Cred, Amazon Pay and WhatsApp.

 

The app processed 172.07 million Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions with a cumulative value of Rs 22,025.89 crore in January. In terms of volume, it recorded a five-fold growth from 33.88 million transactions in January 2025. The total transaction value in the same month was recorded at Rs 11,725.85 crore.

 

With this growth, BHIM is inching towards a 1 per cent market share on the UPI leaderboard, which was recorded at 0.8 per cent in January 2026, data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) show. 

The fifth-largest app, super.money, recorded 298.41 million UPI transactions with a value of Rs 12,546.39 crore.

 

The top two players, PhonePe and Google Pay, control 79 per cent of monthly UPI volume.

 

BHIM’s growth comes over a year after NPCI incorporated BHIM as a wholly owned subsidiary, hiving it off into a new entity known as NPCI-BHIM Services Ltd (NBSL) in August 2024.

 

The move was intended to bring more focus to growing BHIM as a payments app.

 

In 2025, NBSL rolled out a new version of the app for its users.

 

To be sure, the deadline for implementing a market cap limit for third-party UPI apps is set for December 31, 2026. NPCI had initially proposed a 30 per cent cap on the volume of transactions that UPI apps can process in November 2020.