While digital payments have witnessed a growth trajectory over the last few months, wallet transactions and card payments have come off the highs on increased cash circulation. July has been a positive growth story in that context, with all modes of transaction picking up on a monthon-month basis.
Wallets or prepaid payment instruments grew almost 5% to clock 88.7 million transactions compared with 84.7 million in June. It was the highest in May at 91.3 million transactions. The central bank has been releasing monthly figures for digital transactions following the government’s move to derecognise high-denomination currency notes in 2016.
These monthly figures help in tracking the major modes of digital payments across cards, wallets, unified payments interface (UPI) and immediate payment system (IMPS). These numbers are provisional figures sourced from National Payments Corporation of India and include the top four banks and top eight wallet players, as per definition of the central bank.
Other than wallets, UPI, the poster boy of digital payments for the government, showed a strong growth of 11.7% in July, registering 11.4 million transactions against 10.2 million in June and 9.2 million in May.
While smartphone-based payments have picked up post the government’s push, the major driver of growth has been debit card payments over point of sales (PoS) terminals. With their much larger volumes, debit cards transactions have seen 1.7% month-on-month growth. In July, card transactions clocked 236.4 million against 232.4 million in the previous month .
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