WhatsApp appears to have not been able to convince more users to utilise its payments feature as the app received negative growth in terms of UPI transactions in January, according to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). However, PhonePe continued to lead UPI apps with a total market share of 41.21 percent in terms of transactional volume of all 56 apps (2.35074 billion transactions) reported by NPCI. The strong position of the Walmart-owned app has made it tougher for Google Pay to return to the top position as it’s still at second place.

The data posted on the NPCI site shows that UPI transactions via WhatsApp declined nearly 31 percent to 560,000 in January from 810,000 in December. Despite the significant drop in the transaction volume, the app owned by Facebook was able to receive over 22 percent increase in payments value that came to Rs. 36.44 crores in January. It was up from the Rs. 29.72 crores reported a month earlier. Its market share in terms of transaction volume, however, was a measly 0.02 percent.

WhatsApp received the go-ahead for its anticipated payments feature in November — though in a graded manner. The initial restriction alongside limited adoption and the recent criticism over its privacy policy update could be among the key reasons for its poor performance.

In contrast, PhonePe processed 968.72 million transactions in January that were worth Rs. 1,91,973.77 crores. The transaction volume on the PhonePe app was up by 7.39 percent over 902.03 million transactions noted in December. The value of transactions processed through PhonePe also grew over five percent in the last two months.

Following PhonePe, Google Pay came second with 853.53 million transactions worth Rs. 1,77,791.47 crores in January. The Google app saw 0.1 percent decline in its transaction volume from 854.49 million in December that were worth Rs. 176,199.33 crores. Its market share in terms of transaction volume was 36.31 percent.

Paytm Payments Bank continued at third spot with 281.18 million customer-initiated transactions worth Rs. 33,909.50 crores in January. Its market share in terms of transaction volume was 14.15 percent. The app saw over 9.6 percent increase in its customer-initiated transaction volume and over 8.36 percent in value when compared to the December data. It was followed by Amazon Pay that processed 46.30 million transactions worth Rs. 4,044.38 crores, and its market share in terms of transaction volume was 1.97 percent.

NPCI’s BHIM app processed 23.38 million transactions in January that were amounting to Rs. 7,462.94 crores. It saw a 5.72 percent dip in transaction volume and 3.68 percent in value over the data provided for December. Its market share in terms of transaction volume was 0.99 percent.

Overall, UPI transactions in the country grew 3.06 percent to 2,302.73 million in January. These transactions were worth Rs. 4,31,181.89 crores in total, up from the Rs. 4,16,176.21 crores in December, as per the NPCI data.

---

What will be the most exciting tech launch of 2021? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.