UPI in Dec 2024: PhonePe, Google Pay continue to dominate; Paytm slips further

09 Jan 2025, 07:48 PM

The market share of the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led fintech further plummeted to 6.87% in the month of December.

Team Head&Tale

PhonePe and Google Pay continue to dominate the UPI payments space with 47.7% and 36.7% market share in December 2024.

According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data, PhonePe registered 7.98 billion UPI transactions worth Rs 11.76 lakh crore; whereas Google Pay witnessed 6.1 billion transaction volume worth Rs 8.22 lakh crore for the month.

Paytm, a distant third, saw 1.15 billion transactions with a total value of Rs 1.25 lakh crore. The market share of the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led fintech further plummeted to 6.87% in the month of December.

It is worth noting that in October 2024, almost 10 months after the Reserve Bank of India imposed a regulatory ban, Paytm received approval from NPCI to resume onboarding new users onto its UPI platform. However, despite this, Paytm did not see any improvement in its traction.

On the other hand, Sachin Bansal-led Navi recorded 202.53 million transactions worth Rs 11,317 crore, while Cred recorded 143 million transactions valued at Rs 50,979.94 crore.

In addition, WhatsApp recorded 57.7 million transactions worth Rs 4,348.19 crore.

NPCI recently extended the UPI market cap deadline by another two years. The cap was first announced in 2020 with an aim to reduce the concentration risk in the digital payments market. "Considering various factors, the timeline for compliance of existing TPAPs who are exceeding the volume cap, is extended by two years i.e. till December 31, 2026," the RBI said in a circular on December 31.

This is the second time NPCI has extended the timeline by two years, as PhonePe and Google Pay hold close to 85% market share of UPI payments in India. Last year, The Head and Tale reported that NPCI was facing difficulty in implementing the 30% cap on; and the market was going to miss the December 2024 deadline too. 

Also to increase competition, NPCI removed user onboarding restrictions for WhatsApp Pay. The fintech regulator had previously increased the limit to 100 million users for WhatsApp Pay in November 2022. Now, WhatsApp Pay has received a go-ahead to offer UPI payments services to millions of users in India, which is expected to be over 500 million. 

It would be interesting to see if WhatsApp will be able to make any dent in UPI payments space because even with 100 million user cap, WhatsApp ranked 11th among UPI apps in terms of the number of transactions as of December 2024.