Fintech startup said on Monday it processed $830 million-worth UPI transactions on the back of 106 million transactions in March — its highest ever — and retained the number three position in the UPI person-to-merchant category.
Paytm and PhonePe lead the UPI payments vertical in India, followed by Google Pay.
BharatPe said the 7x growth in the volume of UPI transactions from April 2020 to March 2021 was led by increased adoption of digital payments across lower-tier cities and towns, as well as customers moving to safer and more convenient modes of transactions, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A sharp spike in ecommerce sales due to the pandemic has also led to digital payments firms processing more online transactions.
BharatPe said it aims to expand into 100 more cities in FY22, and expand its merchant network by adding four million merchants to its existing list of six million by the end of 2021.
“With customers moving to digital payments, owing to convenience and safety, we saw a huge spike in digital transactions beyond our top 30 cities. In order to cater to the increased demand, we expanded our footprint from 30 to 100 cities in the last 12 months,” said Suhail Sameer, Group President, BharatPe, in a press statement.
Payments enabled by UPI have more than doubled from April 2020 and helped India attain the tag of the “world’s largest real-time digital payments market,” outpacing China and the US, as per a report by ACI Worldwide and Global Data.
By 2025, digital payments are expected to account for over 70 percent of all payments volumes in India, leaving cash and cheques at below 30 percent, the report added.
The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) recorded over Rs 5 lakh crore worth of transactions in March on the back of 2.73 billion transactions, as per NPCI reports.
