2 April: India’s UPI sets new records in March 2023 with 8.7 billion transactions worth Rs 14 lakh crore The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s flagship online money transfer platform, has achieved new milestones in March 2023. According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI processed 8.7 billion transactions in March 2023, the highest-ever number since its inception. The value of these transactions was Rs 14 lakh crore, also a new record.
These figures represent a 60% and 46% increase in volume and value terms respectively from March 2022, when UPI had processed 5.4 billion transactions worth Rs 9.6 lakh crore. They also show a recovery from February 2023, when UPI had seen a slight dip due to the fewer number of days in the month.
March 2023 also marked the end of a remarkable fiscal year for UPI, which witnessed an 82% growth in transactions to 8,376 crore and a 65% growth in value to Rs 139 lakh crore compared to FY22.
NPCI said that UPI is used for all kinds of payments, ranging from investments, small ticket purchases to online payments. It also said that 99.9% of UPI transactions are direct bank account-to-account transfers. Recently, NPCI and RBI have enabled linking RuPay credit cards to UPI for merchant payments through prepaid payment instruments (PPIs), either cards or wallets. This is expected to provide more options for customers to make UPI payments.
RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had said that UPI has the potential to process 100 crore transactions per day. Currently, UPI handles around 25-30 crore transactions per day, amounting to about Rs 45,000-50,000 crore