The digital payments ecosystem in India went on to witness historic growth in the second half of 2024, which was driven by the unified payments interface, also known as UPI. In addition to it, it was also pushed due to the expansion when it comes to POS infrastructure as well as the growing preference when it comes to mobile transactions.
This has been confirmed by the India Digital Payments Report 2H 2024 rolled out by Worldline India. Notably, UPI continues to dominate the overall digital payments in India space, with transaction volumes expanding at a rate of 42% year-on-year to 9323 crore transactions.
Additionally, the transaction value appears to be surging by 31% to ₹130.19 lakh crore. Both the segments when it comes to UPI, which is person-to-person (P2P), as well as person-to-merchant (P2M) payments, have gone on to witness robust growth.
Interestingly, P2P transactions grew by almost 30%, rising from 2704 crore in the second half of 2023 to almost 3521 crores within the same period of 2024.
The volume of P2M transactions, on the other hand, grew by 50% to 5803 crore, and overall value increased by almost 43% to ₹36.35 lakh crore.
Notably, the average transaction size into 2H 2024 was around ₹1396 as compared to ₹1515 in the year before period. This translated to an 8% decline, thereby indicating the rising usage of UPI when it comes to low-value transactions.
The chief executive officer of Worldline, India, Ramesh Narasimhan, said that the digital payments ecosystem in India is indeed evolving at a pace that was never thought of and is driven by the widespread adoption when it comes to UPI, apart from the expansion in infrastructure of POS, as well as the rising preference in terms of mobile transactions.
The very fast growth of the SoftPOS technology is indeed redefining how businesses are accepting payments, thereby making the digital payments in India more accessible than before. Notably, the card payments in the second half of 2024 rose by almost 11% to 400 crore transactions. This was majorly driven Due to a 36% increase in credit card usage, it reached 242 crore transactions. But the debit card usage dropped by 29% to almost 82 lakhs, whereas the prepaid card transactions grew by 11% to 86 lakhs. The POS terminals went on to cross the 1 crore mark, thereby giving out a 23% year-on-year growth in rollout. In addition to this, the mobile payments transactions grew 41%, to 8854 crores, thereby reinforcing a mobile-first financial behavior, as per the report.