According to NPCI data, 17.89 billion UPI transactions took place in April, with a total value of ₹23.95 lakh crore.
Compared to the same time last year, the number of transactions went up by 34%.
The average number of transactions slightly increased to 596 million in April, up from 590 million in March.
UPI transactions slightly dropped by 2.2%, going from 18.30 billion in March to 17.89 billion in April.
According to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI transactions in April totaled 17.89 billion, amounting to ₹23.95 lakh crore. This is a 3.3% drop compared to ₹24.77 lakh crore in transactions from the previous month.
UPI transaction count jumped to 18.30 Bn in March from 16.11 Bn in February, recording a fresh all-time high.
UPI transactions in April were 11% higher than in February.
The average number of transactions slightly increased to 596 million in April, up from 590 million in March. However, the average daily transaction amount was ₹79,831 crore in April, a slight decrease from ₹79,910 crore in the previous month.
UPI’s April Throwback
The drop in UPI transaction volume can be linked to the frequent outages that users experienced in April.
Apart from minor issues, users reported two major UPI failures this month.
On April 2, over 500 users reported UPI issues on the outage tracker DownDetector. At that time, NPCI confirmed the outage and said it was due to “increased latency” in the UPI network.
Digital transactions were disrupted the following week due to a UPI failure. According to Down Detector, over 2,387 users have reported problems. NPCI confirmed the issue, saying they were facing “intermittent technical issues,” which caused some UPI transactions to fail.
After noticing the frequent UPI issues, the payments authority met with major banks and UPI apps to discuss the recent outages. During the meeting, NPCI asked banks and app providers to be careful when publicly commenting about the outages.
On April 26, NPCI issued a notice instructing PSP banks and acquiring banks to make only necessary API requests to UPI for proper use.
An API is a set of rules that allows different software systems to communicate with each other. If these APIs are used excessively, it can slow down response times, cause transaction delays for all users, and even lead to transaction failures because the system becomes overloaded.
What’s New For UPI?
Apart from the outages, UPI also experienced several other changes last month.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) permitted NPCI to change the transaction limits on UPI for person-to-merchant (P2M) payments. However, person-to-person (P2P) transactions will still be limited to INR 1 lakh.
In addition, NPCI’s managing director, Dilip Asbe, mentioned that the authority plans to add 200-300 million new users to UPI.
The finance ministry also cleared up the confusion by rejecting rumors that the government was considering imposing a goods and services tax (GST) on UPI transactions over INR 2,000.
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