Smart plans, rising use-cases drive small UPI players' growth

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in India is witnessing a significant shift.

- AJINKYA KAWAIE

While top players continue to dominate, smaller companies are displaying growth, driven by differentiated strategies and expanding use cases.

Smaller players on the UPI leaderboard, such as Navi, Groww, and MobiKwik, have shown remarkable year-on-year (Y-o-Y) growth.

Navi, owned by Sachin Bansal, jumped to sixth place in August last year, processing 88.71 million transactions, surpassing Amazon Pay, which processed 70.72 million transactions in the same month.

Fintechs such as Groww and MobiKwik, which will have its initial public offering, have seen their volumes more than treble on a Y-o-Y basis (August 2024 compared to August 2023). During the same time, PhonePe and Google Pay have seen their volumes rise by 46.9 per cent and 48.6 per cent, respectively.

The combined market share of smaller players, those outside the top five on the UPI leaderboard, remains modest at just over 5 per cent as of August 2023, according to the data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

However, transaction volumes of third-party application providers (TPAPs) like Navi and Amazon Pay have seen significant growth as the year-end deadline approaches to cap a single player's UPI market share at 30 per cent.