Transactions on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform rose 60% year-on-year (y-o-y) in March to a record 8.7 billion, data from National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) showed.
In terms of value, payments on the platform rose 46% y-o-y to Rs 14.05 trillion.
The platform witnessed 7.5 billion transactions in February and 8 billion in January. However, in terms of value, transactions had fallen to Rs 12.35 trillion in February from Rs 12.98 trillion in January.
NPCI data come when transactions on the UPI platform have risen sharply in recent times. The growth of UPI payments has accelerated with the preference of digital payments during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Traditionally, the most preferred method of UPI transactions is linking the bank account in any UPI-enabled application for making payments, which contributes over 99.9% of the total UPI transactions.
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NPCI managing director and chief executive officer Dilip Asbe said in a recent event that the platform has the bandwidth to process 1 billion transactions per day. On an average, currently, UPI processes about 30 million transactions a day.
The central bank has recently allowed linking RuPay credit cards to UPI and making payments through prepaid payment instruments. This is expected to aid the growth of UPI transactions.
