New Delhi: In just five years, the digital payments fuelled by the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) technology that enables users to make real-time interbank payments to other UPI users, merchants and utilities with few clicks on their smartphone, have penetrated the country, shows a new report about trends in the industry.
Flipkart owned UPI payment platform PhonePe has documented some interesting trends in its latest industry report Pulse released last week. The report showed that the PhonePe users have been using the App for carrying out digital payments in more than 19,000 pin code locations, that is 99% of the total pin codes in the country, covering from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. These locations also cover Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.
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In the case of PhonePe, which has 133 million monthly active users and 46% market share in UPI payments as per the NPCI data, 80 per cent transactions come from tier-2, tier-3, tier-4 towns and rural areas.
Moreover, of the total digital transactions only one third come from tier-1 (18.1%) and tier-2 towns (15.9%) and nearly two-third transactions (65.9%) come from tier-3 towns and beyond that includes rural areas and hinterland part of the country.
Five states dominate P2P transactions
The peer-to-peer payment (P2P transactions), where one user transfers money digitally to another user, still dominates the volume of transactions in the case of PhonePe users, followed by payments made to merchants and recharge transactions that are used for pre-paid mobile recharge, DTH recharge, utility and electricity payments, among other things.
In the case of P2P transactions, nearly 58% PhonePe transactions come from five states - Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Rajasthan.
Here also, tier-3 towns, cities, and rural areas dominate the P2P transactions among the PhonePe users, with nearly half of the transactions coming from tier-3 towns and rural areas.
Karnataka tops the digital transactions
Karnataka, home to India’s IT capital Bengaluru, tops among the states in terms of total digital transactions carried on PhonePe with over 15% share, followed by Maharashtra and Telangana. These 3 states alone account for 40% of digital transactions on the platform.
Kerala, biggest gold buyer, not buying gold online
In terms of buying gold online, the southern state of Kerala that buys the maximum gold in the country in terms of volume has not yet taken to buying the yellow metal online and does not even figure among the top 10 states where PhonePe users buy gold online.
Maharashtra tops the list of states where PhonePe users buy gold online with 11% market share, followed by West Bengal (10%), Uttar Pradesh (10%), Andhra Pradesh (8%), Telangana (8%), Karnataka (8%), Rajasthan (6%), Odisha (6%), Madhya Pradesh (5%) and Bihar (5%).
