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The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) continues to touch new milestones, with the volume of transactions for August touching 3.5 billion.

The total volume of transactions on the digital platform for financial transactions in India for August stood at 3.5 billion as compared to 3.2 billion in the previous month — a monthly growth of 9.5 percent — according to data provided by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

The transaction value stood at Rs 6,39,117 crore, a monthly rise of 5.4 percent.

Since its inception in April 2016, the UPI platform is witnessing a steady increase in both the volume and value of transactions. It reached an important milestone of billion transactions in October 2019, and has been seeing a steady rise with minor blips in some months.

The volume of transactions on UPI crossed the two billion mark in October 2020, creating an important benchmark for the platform.

Further, UPI is also witnessing intense competition from three key players in this segment – PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm. In fact, PhonePe has emerged as the market leader, overtaking Google Pay since December 2021.

For July, PhonePe had a 46 percent market share, followed by Google Pay at 34.45 percent, and Paytm at 11.94 percent.

The evolving UPI and fintech market has seen each player adopting different growth strategies. Paytm is positioning itself as a full financial services player, while PhonePe is getting into the insurance segment. On the other hand, Google Pay has started to offer fixed deposit schemes.

These developments come amidst changes announced by NPCI, where it wants to limit the market share of third-party UPI apps to a maximum of 30 percent. Although the deadline to adhere to these regulations is still away.

Meanwhile, in a surprising turn about, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has put plans to set up a new umbrella entity (NUE), a platform similar to UPI, on hold, citing challenges in data security.