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Even as the e-wallets and other ecommerce platforms are trying to promote digital transactions and the use of their payment gateways, there seems to be disagreement between, Flipkart-owned PhonePe and Paytm over the numbers and volume of transactions on their respective sites.
The background to this is the release of statistics for the month of February 2018 by NPCI, giving out the transactions made using the UPI app. Quoting these figures, PhonePe’s founder and chief executive officer Sameer Nigam has posted a blog in which he has questioned Paytm’s claims of having the leadership position as far as the UPI payments are concerned.
According to the figures put out by NPCI and as interpreted by PhonePe, the comparison in terms of transactions per customer per month is 525 for Paytm while it is just 5 per month for PhonePe. However, the average value per transaction on Paytm is just Rs 40 whereas it is Rs 1800 on PhonePe.
So, they put this in perspective by pointing out that where 40,000 customers did 525 transactions valued at just Rs 40 each on Paytm, in the case of PhonePe, 6,000,000 unique customers did 5 transactions in a month (this is for February 2018), at an average of Rs 1,800 each.
In conclusion, PhonePe says that broad based adoption of UPI has not happened on Paytm yet. “If 40,000 unique customers are doing 21Mn transactions, by extrapolation this would imply that the total UPI transacting base for Paytm is 40,000 * 68 / 21 = 1.3 lakh customers,” Sameer says in the post.
PhonePe feels this is due to the cash-back incentives being offered on Paytm and therefore their claim of leadership in the UPI payments sphere is lopsided or uni-dimensional.
PhonePe has gone on to appreciate the transparent manner in which the NPCI has been sharing data and have expressed their opinion that the parameter for evaluating better utilization of the UPI app is by measuring the number of unique transactions and the actual overall value of money transacted.