Festivals drive up digi-pay in Q1

Chennai: Festivals drove digital payments in the March quarter as UPI transactions went up 328 per cent in volume terms and 495 per cent value-wise.

The digital transactions in the March quarter saw a higher growth during the festival days. Holi recorded 53 per cent growth in transaction volumes and 79 per cent growth in value. Restaurants, salon and beauty services, household appliances, apparel retail reported 120 to 150 per cent growth in value terms.

Pongal, which fell on January 15, saw 29 per cent growth in volume and 55 per cent growth in value. In select categories like cinema, household appliances, petrol stations and vehicle rentals, the value growth was 40 to 50 per cent.

Republic Day reported 37 per cent growth in transaction volumes and 29 per cent rise in value with key categories like restaurants, hotels, salon and beauty services, pubs, specialty retail witnessed 65 to 80 per cent growth.

Restaurants, specialty retail, jewellery, beauty spas, gifts were the key categories on Valentine's Day, which witnessed 25 per cent rise in volumes and 35 per cent in value.

"January was the month with the highest number of transactions in Q1 2019. January 23 ranked as the day with the highest number of transactions but this should come as no surprise given the commencement of the Republic Day sale offers. The days with second and third highest number of transactions were January 12 and January 13 which were Lohri and Makar Sankrati respectively. The trend of highest number of transactions recorded during festivals continued like previous year," said Deepak Chandnani, Managing Director, Worldline South Asia & Middle East.

UPI has been key in steering the entire ecosystem of consumers, payment processors and banks towards digital transformation and it continued its monumental growth in 2019. UPI transactions clocked 2.1 billion transactions in the quarter, 328 per cent up from Q1 of the previous year. In terms of value, UPI clocked Rs 3.5 trillion, up 495 per cent. Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay together process 80-90 per cent of UPI transactions, of which Paytm leads in terms of transactions volume and Google Pay leads in terms of transaction amount.

The total number of credit card transactions was 466 million, an increase of 24.5 per cent over the previous year and the total number of debit card transactions was 3.7 billion - up by 18.5 per cent. Total value of transactions done on credit cards was Rs 1.6 trillion- up 30.4 per cent and that on debit cards was Rs 9.6 trillion - an increase of 8.4 per cent.