PhonePe Continues to Lead UPI-Based Payments Market With Over 970mn Transactions in February 2021

PhonePe continued to lead the UPI-based digital payments market in India in February 2021, with over 970 million transactions, the company announced earlier today. The digital payments firm adds that the platform clocked over 1.07 billion total transactions across UPI, cards and wallets on its platform  for the same period. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) website shows that roughly 2,292 million UPI transactions worth Rs 4,25,062 crores took place in India last month, though the full report is yet to be shared. PhonePe’s domestic rival Paytm has also announced that the platform clocked more than 1.2 billion transactions in February 2021, posting a 15 percent month-on-month growth. In January 2021, Paytm Payments Bank took the third spot with 281.18 million UPI-based transactions worth Rs 33,909.50 crores.

PhonePe adds that its continuing success in the digital payments space is mainly attributed to the expansion across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, where the company seemingly digitised over 17.5 million Kirana stores. The e-payments company had previously announced its plans to digitise 25 million Kiranas by the end of 2021. Speaking more over the development, Sameer Nigam, Founder and chief officer at PhonePe said that the company continues to dominate industry metrics in terms of the active user base, active merchant-base, total transactions and TPV (total payment volume). “We are delighted to retain our pole position as the top digital payments platform in the country. I am very proud to report that PhonePe is leading across all core. We will continue to transform lives positively while building simple, scalable and innovative products for every Indian,” Nigam in the statement added.

PhonePe’s growth can be also attributed to the slew of updates the app has been adding since last year. Recently, the company partnered with Axis Bank on UPI multi-bank model, giving users an option to create and use multiple UPI IDs with an Axis Bank ID. Apart from this, PhonePe will start acquiring merchants with Axis Bank in addition to its partnership with YES Bank. It 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.