Google Pay, PhonePe lead UPI market in November, drive 82% of all transactions

Digital payment platforms PhonePe and Google Pay have emerged as leaders in the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) segment for the month of November.

The two players, according to data published by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), cumulatively drove more than 82% of the 2.21 billion transactions recorded on the four-year-old peer-to-peer payments platform last month.

Google’s payment platform witnessed a little more than 960 million UPI transactions, while PhonePe, which was recently spun off into a separate entity by Flipkart, followed closely with 868.40 million transactions. 

In terms of transaction value, however, PhonePe led the category, with users transacting as much as Rs 1,75,453.85 crore in the month of November. Google Pay saw Rs 1,61,418.19 crore worth of transactions during the same period, despite the higher volumes.

PhonePe crossed the 250 million user mark back in October, while Google Pay is also expected to have surpassed the 100 million mark. The last time Google reported its payment platform’s user count was in September 2019 when it said the service had about 67 million users.

The two platforms compete against over a dozen third-party apps that use the open architecture of UPI. Among these, the biggest rivals are Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm, Amazon Pay, and NPCI’s own BHIM app.

As per the data published by NPCI, Paytm was the third most dominant player in the UPI category, with 260.09 million transactions with a total value of Rs 28,986.93 crore, while Amazon saw some 37 million UPI transaction, valued at about Rs 3,524.51 crore.

Notably, in comparison to the month of October, the transaction volume on all the aforementioned UPI platforms has grown, except for Amazon Pay. It saw a month-on-month decline of about 9.5 million transactions.

The general growth in person-to-person and person-to-merchant UPI transactions comes as more and more people continue to adopt online payment modes due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the increasing penetration of smartphones. 

On top of that, additional financial services and cashback schemes on transactions also incentivise users to transact online.