Whatsapp Transactions Rise By 100% In 30 Days; 129 Cr Transactions On Google Pay Registered

India is going digital in a big way. Digital payments are an important frontier in the mission of Digital India. There are various players who trying to take a pie out of this huge market. Be it homegrown brands like PhonePe, PayTM or players like Google Pay WhatsApp are making this lucrative market very competitive.

WhatsApp Transactions rise by 100%

WhatsApp’s UPI arm saw its transactions double over the last month. The company said that it is scaling up the service in a phased manner.

Even though WhatsApp’s share in the volume of UPI payments was a meager 0.27 percent in September, its market share has risen from 0.01 percent in August. The major reason for this abysmal performance is WhatsApp’s UPI feature is restricted to only 20 million users as per NPCI’s directions.

The Facebook-owned platform saw volumes double from 5 lakh to 10 lakh from August to September. The value of total transactions on WhatsApp has increased from Rs 44.70 crore to Rs 62.31 crore.

Right now the company is focusing on driving awareness of our payments to feature on WhatsApp and building new use cases to transact.

The app is planning to place the rupee icon directly in the chat composer between the attachment and the camera icon to ensure that the payment option is more visible to users.

Other platforms are also fighting for the market share

The top three players in the digital payments space using the UPI platform maintained their market share despite WhatsApp doubling its transactions.

PhonePe is still dominating the market leader in the United Payments Interface (UPI) segment, It is followed by Google Pay and Paytm Payments Bank.

In September PhonePe logged in 165 crore transactions which amounted to Rs 3.06 lakh crore. The digital payments-to-financial services company commanded an impressive 45 percent share of the volume pie and 47 percent of the value of UPI transactions, according to data by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Google Pay has successfully retained 35 percent market share in volume terms and 38 percent in values. The payments gateway by technology giant Google recorded 129 crore transactions amounting to Rs 2.50 lakh crore.

Paytm Payments Bank stayed the third, though its value market share made a nose dive to 9 percent in September from 14 percent in July. In terms of volume, Paytm controlled over 14 percent of the market through 53.8 crore transactions worth Rs 60,094 crore.

As the festival season arrives, it would be interesting to see how the digital payments space evolves in the upcoming months.