HT Bureau
GUWAHATI, May 4: PhonePe released the digital payment trends for Q1 2022 on Wednesday. As India’s go-to destination for accurate and comprehensive data, the latest PhonePe Pulse trends reveal interesting insights on digital payments in the country. The first quarter of the year saw a spike in P2P and P2M transactions, and strong growth in both payment volumes as well as the number of registered users, indicating a continued uptick in digital payments.
According to a report by the ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, UPI has now become the most popular mode of payment and 58% of the total 15 lakh merchants in the North East have been digitised. The PhonePe Pulse data throws light on the varied use case of these digital payments trends seen in the NER. Consistent efforts made by digital payment companies to educate, engage and empower merchants have led to the phenomenal growth of merchant networks across the country. This change has also been enabled by the interoperable QR codes riding on top of UPI, allowing merchants to accept payments from customers and pay suppliers with minimal resistance. Riding on this growth, PhonePe has digitised nearly 30 million merchants, adding over 3 million merchants in Q1 2022 alone.
PhonePe Pulse data indicates that geographically, Andaman and Nicobar Islands-registered the highest jump in P2M transactions with a 29% Q-o-Q increase in this period. Also, sixteen states and union territories witnessed over 100% growth in merchants onboarded in 2021 vs 2020, bearing testimony to the increasing acceptance of digital payments across India. Merchants in Uttar Pradesh lead the adoption numbers as per PhonePe Pulse data, followed by Maharashtra, Karnataka, West Bengal, and Rajasthan, comprising 49% of the merchants in the PhonePe network.
While the pandemic was an inflection point for the adoption of digital payments, PhonePe Pulse Q1 2022 data is a testimony to the growth momentum that has been sustained over the last 2 years. The UPI numbers released by NPCI in March 2022 show the overall transaction volume was over 5.4 billion and PhonePe Pulse data indicates a surge in both P2P and P2M volumes. This growth momentum is expected to continue as the payments ecosystem targets the next 500 million users with a focus on getting new users from Tier 3, 4, and beyond to the digital payments fold.
