27 January, 2025
Payment System Report, December 2024
Tue 28 Jan, 2025
Context
- The Reserve Bank has published the Payment System Report, December 2024, to analyse the trends in payment transactions carried out using various payment systems in India during the last five calendar years up to CY-2024, covers important developments in the payment ecosystem and provides an in-depth analysis into UPI.
Key Findings
- Credit Cards
- At end-December 2024, the number of credit cards has more than doubled to around 10.80 crore as compared to December 2019.
- Digital Transactions
- In calendar year (CY)-2013 there were 222 crore digital transactions valued at Rs 772 lakh crore, it has increased 94 times in volume and more than 3.5 times in value to over 20,787 crore transactions valued at Rs 2,758 lakh crore in CY-2024.
- In the last five years alone, digital payments in India have increased 6.7 times in volume and 1.6 times in value. This amounts to a five-year CAGR of 45.9% in terms of digital payments volume and 10.2% in terms of digital payments value.
- Retail digital payments in India have grown from 162 crore transactions in the financial year 2012-13 to over 16,416 crore transactions in the financial year 2023-24 i.e., approximately 100-fold increase over 12 years.
- In 2024, India recorded 208.5 billion digital payment transactions.
- UPI
- The contribution of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to the cumulative digital payments ecosystem more than doubled in five years, rising from 34% in 2019 to 83% in 2024.
- The National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) low-value transaction payment method, UPI Lite, recorded 2.04 million transactions daily, valued at ₹20.02 crore in December 2024.
- UPI P2M (person-to-merchant) grew at a CAGR of 99 per cent for transaction values below ₹500 over 2019-24. In contrast, UPI P2P (person-to-person) grew at a CAGR of 56 per cent during the same period.
- Other digital payment methods
- The share of other digital payment methods, such as National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT), Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), and credit and debit cards, declined from 66% in 2019 to 17% at the end of 2024.
- Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPIs)
- Prepaid payment instruments (PPIs), which include digital wallets, declined by 12.3% in volume, falling to 3.45 billion transactions in the second half of calendar year 2024 (H2 CY24) from 3.93 billion in H2 CY23.
Various efforts have been taken to internationalise domestic card network i.e. RuPay
- Acceptance of Indian RuPay Cards has been enabled in Bhutan, Nepal, Singapore, Maldives, Mauritius and the UAE for use at ATM and PoS terminals.
- As per the MoU signed between RBI and CBUAE in July 2023, CBUAE has developed its domestic card scheme 'JAYWAN' based on RuPay technology stack. Soft launch of the JAYWAN card was done in February 2024.
- The fast payment systems of India (UPI) and Singapore (PayNow) were linked in February 2023.
- RBI has also joined Project Nexus, a multilateral international initiative to enable instant cross-border retail payments by interlinking domestic fast payment systems of multiple countries.
- Payments to merchants using Indian UPI apps via QR codes have been enabled in Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the UAE.
Reserve Bank of India
- Recommendation: Hilton Young Commission (1926)
- Statutory basis: RBI Act, 1934
- Estb: 1st April, 1935
- HQ: Mumbai
- Nationalised: 1949
- First Governor: Osborne Smith (1935-37)
- First Indian Governor: C.D. Deshmukh (1943-49)
- Current Governor: Sanjay Malhotra