Overall digital payments volume dips 30%, UPI payments fall 37%

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has seen a fall of 37 percent, followed by cards at 30 percent and net banking at 28 percent during the lockdown period, payment gateway service provider Razorpay said on April 24.

Among UPI payment apps, Paytm led the fall with more than 47 percent, followed by Google Pay at 43 percent and PhonePe at 37 percent. Overall digital transactions have dipped by 30 percent.

As India continues to battle COVID-19 with a second phase of nationwide lockdown underway, consumption of non essential products has come to a halt. This has caused massive drops in payment transactions over the last few weeks.

Bengaluru-based Razorpay processes digital payments for more than 10 lakh businesses like Indigo, Thomas Cook, Bombay Stock Exchange, Reliance, Spicejet, among others.

Looking at broader sector wise trends, media and entertainment, bill payments, information technology and software saw rise in digital payments. Bill payments have jumped the most at 73 percent. Sectors like travel, real estate, grocery and food delivery have suffered the most, with travel down the most by more than 87 percent.

Razorpay managed to process a massive volume of transactions made as donations and as per their metrics, the volumes had jumped 180%.

"In the first two weeks of March before lockdown, the overall online spending increased by about 10 percent but later saw a dip primarily owing to precautionary measures which people started to take by staying indoors. This pandemic is also a turning point for the fintech industry in many ways, one such being the tremendous adoption in the use of digital payments, especially in tier-two and three cities in the last 30 days of lockdown," said Harshil Mathur, chief executive officer, Razorpay.