India made 7,422 crore digital payments in FY 2021-22 at 33% growth rate: MeitY

The volume of digital payments in India has increased by 33% year-on-year (YoY) during the financial year (FY) 2021-2022. A total of 7,422 crore digital payment transactions were recorded during this period, up from 5,554 crore transactions seen in FY 2020-21, said the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY). 

NPCI’s unified payment interface (UPI) was the most used platform for digital transactions during the period, accounting for 452.75 crore transactions with a value of ₹8.27 lakh crore, until the end of February.   

According to NPCI, the total volume of UPI transactions during the month of February was almost twice the transactions seen a year ago. In February 2021, 229.2 crore UPI transactions worth ₹4.25 lakh crore were made. This shows that the use of UPI on a monthly basis in particular has almost doubled in the last year.  

The use of digital payment apps in India has grown considerably, especially after the pandemic, which forced people to stay indoors and order food and other items through online platforms. To avoid contact with delivery agents, many of the online stores and aggregator platforms had blocked cash payments.   

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PhonePe with 212 crore transactions was the leading UPI app during February with Google Pay right behind it with 152.4 crore transactions, as per NPCI data.  

India has been the leading market in terms of digital payments since 2019. According to a March 2021 report by ACI Worldwide, India was the leading market for real-time payments transactions with 2550 crore payments, followed by China (1570 crore) and South Korea (600 crores). The US with 120 crore transactions was ranked 9th.  

In the last few months, RBI has implemented several rules to make online transactions more secure. Last September, it implemented an additional factor of authentication (AFA) for all recurring credit or debit card payments. It was followed by a mandate on card-on-file-tokenisation that requires all payment companies to replace card details with an alternative code called a token.