In recent times, Unified Payments Interface or UPI has made it very easy for people to get their monetary transactions done in a breeze. This is applicable for both business and personal transactions since via UPI, it can be done instantly and without additional costs. For those of you unaware, UPI is regulated and governed by the NCPI or National Corporation of India, which had recently announced that certain changes will be made to the apps, which were a bit shocking to certain apps like Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay, but that will be discussed later on. Today, it was announced by the Digital India Twitter handle that in India, there had been a 10.8% rise in UPI payments on an MoM or month-on-month basis, with around Rs 6.06 Lakh Crore being the amount that was sent to and received via UPI payment methods.
UPI Usage on a Steady Rise!
This comes at a time when the global pandemic has limited physical outings and most transactions have moved to the online medium. As the situation continues to stabilise, people who have grown accustomed to UPI-based transactions in 2020 and early 2021 will feel odd to move back to bank transfers and card-based payments, so they might stick with the same. Coming back to the new rules, every UPI application will now feature a limit for the transactions that can happen through them and, if the apps violate this limit by hook or by crook, they will be penalised. The most affected applications include the likes of Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay. The first rule that has been set is that none of the UPI apps should have more than a share of 50% UPI transactions done through them if it is their first year of operations. For the app’s second year, they will be barred to process more than 40% of the UPI transactions. For the third year, the apps cannot have a share of more than 33% of UPI transactions. Standings wise Google Pay is at the top of the table with 42% of the market share, after which is PhonePe and Paytm at 35% and 15-20% respectively. What this means is that once Google Pay hits the 50% threshold, it will be barred from accepting more transactions or customers. New users could be banned from being able to sign up with the app or make transactions.
