WhatsApp Pay usage finally picks up steam in India

After enduring a less than satisfactory start in India, WhatsApp Pay seems to be finally picking up steam in terms of its usage.

According to National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) stats, WhatsApp Pay processed 0.81 million UPI transactions worth Rs 29.72 crore in December, which represents more than 100% increase in its use in both volume and value compared to November. Anything around million payments is good, especially considering that these are still early days of WhatsApp Pay in India.

Its rivals PhonePe and Google Pay processed 902.03 million and 854.49 million UPI transactions, respectively, in December 2020.

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PhonePe outdoes Google Pay

A total of 2.2 billion transactions worth Rs 4.16 lakh crore were processed on UPI in December. Around 40% of these payments were made to verified merchants and were classified as peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions, the rest were peer-to-peer, or P2P transactions.

Walmart-backed PhonePe getting past Google Pay as the leader in UPI application is significant.  PhonePe did transactions worth Rs 1.82 lakh crore, with a market share of 40%. 

PhonePe and Google Pay, of course, dominate the UPI transactions segment as they, put together, had around 80% of the total volume. This of course will come down this year as the NPCI-ordained 30% cap will kick in.

Payments Bank App, the third in the pecking order, processed 261.09 million payments.

Along with that, bank apps like that of HDFC, Axis and ICICI were among the 10 most used UPI apps.

NPCI’s BHIM application had 24.80 million transactions worth Rs 7,748.29 crore for December.

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