PhonePe Beats Google Pay To Become India’s #1 UPI Payment App With 40% Market Share

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based payments hit a new high when they crossed 207 crore transactions in October month, as per the reports.

A New Milestone For UPI

Interestingly, exactly one year before it hit the 1 billion monthly transactions milestone.

The main reason for this achievement is that it has become the most popular digital payment method in India.

Due to its open architecture, it is enjoying interoperability among all participating payments apps which includes popular names like Walmart’s PhonePe,  Google Pay, Paytm,  and Amazon Pay.

While talking about this opportunity, chief executive of NPCI, Dilip Asbe said, “Unlike China, we have given equal opportunities to both small and large domestic and foreign companies,” said.

Here NCPI is the payments body behind UPI. 

For the October month, the 2.07 billion UPI transactions resulted in $51.9 billion in value, which is up from $25.7 billion in October 2019. 

Now, NPCI is planning to expand UPI outside of India as mentioned by Asbe previously.

Emerging New Leader In UPI Transactions

Another observation clarifies that for the first time in more than a year, Google Pay did not drive the maximum volume of UPI transactions. 

Instead, PhonePe recorded 835 million UPI transactions in October, comparatively  Google Pay has driven around 820 million, transactions reportedly.

In the case of Paytm, it recorded about 245 million transactions and Amazon Pay settled with about 125 million transactions.

In response to this, PhonePe confirmed the “market-leading position” with over 40% of the market share in UPI.

While Google did not respond to the subject.

Paytm And PhonePe Additional Services 

“Paytm offers a range of funding sources to its customers: Paytm UPI, Paytm Wallet, Paytm Payments Bank account, Debit card, Credit card and net banking. Overall, the transactions through these funding sources have grown over 20% in the month of October. Person-to-merchant (P2M) constitute over 70% of the total transactions,” said a Paytm spokesperson.

Recently, PhonePe has seen a surge in its transactions since more offline shops open and merchants and most consumers are opting for a digital alternative to complete transactions.

They have also added a range of financing services which include 600,000 insurance policies.

But it seems that things are about to get tougher as more players are expected to join this space.

In the meantime, WhatsApp, having over 400 million users in India, has also started testing UPI payments on its app in 2018 remains stuck in a regulatory maze.