After being a usage leader in India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Paytm experienced a sharp decline in transactions in July, while Google Pay and PhonePe have seen usage skyrocket, sources told the Economic Times on Thursday (Aug. 8).
Paytm may have surrendered UPI market share to Google Pay and PhonePe, but the Noida-based licensed payments bank offers consumers many payment modes across wallets and bank accounts. Paytm told ET it has around 70 percent of the market share in overall digital payments across online and offline merchants.
“We achieved over 600 million transactions in July, which includes payments through Paytm Wallet, Paytm UPI, cards and net banking. We are witnessing that the Paytm wallet is more preferred for offline payments than UPI,” Deepak Abbot, senior vice-president at Paytm, told the news outlet. “Paytm is accepted at over 13 million offline stores and our team is aiming to onboard another 12 million merchants by the end of this fiscal year.”
UPI is starting to become the favored way to pay for smaller retail transactions in India, with around 143 banks live on the payments network. Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm accounted for almost 790 million UPI transactions in July, the sources told the news outlet.
Paytm, which is backed by the Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba, saw just under 140 million transactions, about a 15 percent share. Conversely, Google Pay and PhonePe had approximately 300 million transactions each, more than a 35 percent share.
UPI launched in India in 2016 and is fast becoming a payments game-changer as usage continues to soar. At the end of 2018, for instance, Paytm’s 137 million transactions accounted for a 33 percent share of all UPI usage. UPI, which is managed by the National Payments Corporation of India, is also seeing more players come on board, including WhatsApp and Amazon Pay UPI for Android. Apple Pay is also considering a move into India.
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