Digital payments in India accelerated in FY19 due to UPI: RBI report

The volume of retail electronic payments in India grew at an annual pace of more than 50% from 2015 to 2019 driven by higher financial inclusion and adoption of mobile payments, the Reserve Bank of India said in a report.

The growth rate touched 95% in 2018-19 thanks to a steep rise in transactions based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), said the report that benchmarked India’s payment systems against 20 other countries.

The report said that India increased the share of e-money in the payment systems from 0.8% in 2012 to 21.5% in 2017. However, digital payments of utility bills continued to be low.

The report also stated that India is next only to China in terms of the number of ATMs deployed, indicating a high demand for cash. The number of machines fell marginally to 2.21 crore on March 31, 2019 from 2.22 crore at the end of March 2017.

In case of Point of Sale terminals, the annualised pace of deployment was 29% from 2012 to 2017, but the outreach to people is still low. This point also finds a mention in the vision document of the RBI which aims to increase PoS deployment by six-fold by 2021.

The report also said that the volume of card payments at retail outlets grew at a compound annual rate of 40% from 2012 to 2017.

The domestic RuPay card network developed by National Payments Corporation of India had a share of 15% of total cards issued in 2017. This increased to over 50% share by March 31, 2019 with 586 million RuPay cards being issued, the report said.