India’s payments transactions volumes grew 53% in 12 months

The volume and value of payments transactions in the last 12 months, including Real Time Gross Settlements (RTGS), digital payments and more, have outpaced the growth in the last five years. According to P. Vasudhevan, chief general manager, Payment and Settlement Systems, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the rate of growth of payments transactions has seen a 53% increase in volume terms and by 28% in value terms over the period.

Vasudhevan, who was speaking at the Digital Money Conference organized by the Payments Council of India (PCI), said that the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) for the last five years is 42% in volume terms, which is a sign that the growth during the last 12 months have outpaced that in the last five years. 

“Today, we process 21.79 crore payments transactions on a daily basis. It is heartening to recollect that in December last year the RTGS was made operational 24x7x365. Till date, many initiatives have been undertaken to capitalise on this,” he said. “The payment systems like NACH, Bharat Bill Payment were enabled to settle on weekends. The number of settlements in a week has increased by 200, thereby bringing down the credit and settlement risks in the ecosystem,” he added.

The payments industry in India has seen massive growth over the past year, especially on the back of growth in digital transactions. The government’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) recorded 421 crore transactions in October 2021 while 418 crore transactions were recorded in November. UPI payments had grown by 100 percent year-over-year in terms of value, reaching Rs. 7.7 lakh crore in October.

On December 1, Minister of State (MoS) for Electronics and Information Technology (IT), Rajeev Chandrashekhar, told the Parliament that digital payments had grown from 3134 crore in FY2019 to 4683 crore till mid-November 2021. The country had recorded 4572 crore digital transactions in FY 2020 and the government expected the number to grow to 5554 crore in FY2021.