India witnessed 53 percent rise in payments volume in the past 12 months

The rate of growth of payments transactions has seen a 53 per cent increase in volume terms and 28 per cent rise in value terms over the past 12 months.

UPI payment growth is gaining momentum in India. (Image Source: Pixabay)

Despite pandemic related setbacks over the past two years, India witnessed a massive rise in volume and value of payments transactions, including that of Real Time Gross Settlements (RTGS) and digital payments, in the last 12 months, processing at least 21.79 crore transactions on a daily basis.

According to P Vasudevan, Chief General Manager, Payment and Settlement Systems, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the rate of growth of payments transactions has seen a 53 per cent increase in volume terms and 28 per cent rise in value terms over the past 12 months.

Vasudevan was speaking during his valedictory session at the Digital Money Conference, organised by the Payments Council of India.

The compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) for the last five years is 42 per cent in volume terms, so the last 12 months have seen much more growth as compared to 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.

Meanwhile, UPI clocked over 3.65 billion transactions in volume, achieving all time high transactions of Rs 4 billion. From Q3 (July to September) 2021, UPI recorded a 103 per cent increase in volume and close to 100 per cent increase in value as compared with Q3 2020.

At least 54 per cent of the UPI transactions were P2P (person-to person) while 46 per cent were P2M (person-to merchant). It should be noted that 30 banks have joined the UPI ecosystem in Q3 2021, bringing the total number of banks providing UPI services to 259 as of September 2021, said a report by Worldline India titled ‘India Digital Payments Report Q3 2021’.

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Earlier, last week, 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.