National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has reduced the number of daily Unified Payments Interface (UPI) P2P transactions to 10 per bank, from 20 earlier. The measure is taken in order to curb fraud and encourage genuine UPI transactions.
To count the number of transactions with a period of 24 hours, the time stamp of the first transaction will be counted as the start time.
According to an NPCI circular dated 21 October, NPCI stated that this is ‘inclusive to only for P2P transactions originating from a unique bank account’ and does not apply to merchant transactions.
NPCI has been toughening its stance on the fake transactions, earlier in August, the payments organisation, blocked the transactions, where the source and destination of the UPI payment is the same bank account. This move was aimed at restricting users from making artificial transactions, just to avail cashback offers from many digital payments like Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm.
Last month, it was noted that UPI transactions crossed the 400 million mark, continuing its upward trend. Earlier in August, UPI transactions had crossed $300 million mark.
In the month of September, the overall UPI transactions were valued at over ₹59,835 crores, up from ₹54,212 crores, in August.
Paytm topped the number of UPI transactions in September with 137 million, making up 33% of the overall transaction. While Flipkart-owned PhonePe claimed the maximum number of transaction in July, with a 40% market share.
UPI has emerged as a popular mode of transaction in the Indian digital ecosystem, as the customer adoption rate continues to rise, owing to the offers from digital payment platforms and a robust UPI ecosystem.
In August, NPCI launched the UPI 2.0, the latest version, including new features like overdraft facility, one-time mandate, invoice in the inbox, and signed intent and QR, to further strengthen the UPI ecosystem.