India’s flagship digital payments platform ,Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ,saw its highest ever number of transactions in April 2022 at 5.58 billon, amounting to Rs 9.83 trillion.

In March,UPI  breached 5-billion transactions in a month for the first time. In April, volume of transactions was up 3.33 per cent and value of transactions rose 2.36 per cent compared to March.

In March,UPI  processed 5.4 billion transactions amounting to Rs 9.6 trillion.

However, year-on-year (YoY), the volume of transactions jumped 111 per cent and value of transactions increased by almost 100 per cent.

In April 2021,UPI had processed 2.64 billion transactions worth Rs 4.93 trillion.

Initially in FY22, transactions had dipped slightly due to the second wave of Covid. But, since then, UPI transactions  have been on an upward trajectory, mirroring the recovery in the broader economy.

In fact, the pandemic has catalyzed the acceleration of digital payments adoption in the country in the last two years.

In FY22, UPI processed more than 46 billion transactions, amounting to over Rs 84.17 trillion, thus breaching the $1-trillion mark.

And, in FY21, it had processed 22.28 billion transactions, amounting to Rs 41.03 trillion. So, both volume and value of transactions doubled in a year, indicating the meteoric rise seen in digital payments. Further, since the pandemic began, UPI’s transaction volume and value have gone up by over 350 per cent.

Initially, UPI was considered as a preferred payment mode for peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. Now, it has now emerged as the preferred mode for even peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions, with over 56 per cent market share in volume terms in 2021.

UPI crossed 1 billion transactions for the first time in October 2019, almost three years after its launch in 2016.

And, the next billion came in under a year, when in October 2020, UPI processed more than 2 billion transactions.

In the next 10 months, UPI processed 3 billion transactions. And, it took only three months for the payments platform to reach 4 billion transactions per month, from 3 billion.

And, the incremental one billion transactions were achieved in just six months.

The next target for UPI is to process a billion transactions a day in the next 3-5 years. According to experts, the next boost to the already burgeoning UPI transaction will be the AutoPay feature. This has seen massive adoption since recurring payments through cards saw disruption due to the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) new guidelines on e-mandates.

The AutoPay feature of UPI allows recurring payments of up to Rs 5,000. Recent initiatives of the RBI and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) will also boost the transaction count and value in the coming days, said the experts.

NCPI has launched the “on-device” wallet feature for UPI users, which will be known as “UPI Lite”. It will facilitate small- ticket transactions.

NPCI is of the opinion that this “on-device” wallet feature will go a long way in achieving its pipe dream of processing one billion transactions a day in the next 3-5 years.

Further, the RBI — in association with NPCI — has launched the UPI123Pay for 400 million feature phones. This will allow transactions through feature phones without an internet connection.