PhonePe says NE took lead in digital transactions in Q1

New Delhi: Digital payment platform PhonePe on Saturday said that the northeastern region has been a big driver of the growth in the company’s digital transactions in the first quarter of 2022.

Assam witnessed the fastest adoption with over 2.5 lakh merchants in 2022 compared to just 10,000 merchants in 2020, followed by Tripura, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Mizoram.

These insights were a part of the PhonePe Pulse Q1 data.

“As predicted in our fourth-quarter PhonePe Pulse report, we continued to see a surge in volumes in the first quarter of 2022 across various use cases further cementing the fundamental shift in consumer behaviour towards contactless payments,” Karthik Raghupathy, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations at PhonePe, said in a statement.

The PhonePe Pulse trends also revealed that the first quarter of the year saw a spike in the peer-to-peer transaction (P2P) and person to merchant (P2M) transactions, and strong growth in both payment volumes as well as the number of registered users.

“We are also excited about PhonePe’s P2M transactions exceeding P2P transactions indicating that digital payments have truly penetrated the merchant ecosystem and gained ubiquitous acceptance across the country,” Raghupathy said.

“This in turn is creating a virtuous loop of consumer demand fueling merchant acceptance and vice versa. We truly believe that PhonePe Pulse data will continue to enable deeper knowledge sharing in the ecosystem and are looking forward to the future innovations that this data firehose will bring about,” he added.

PhonePe Pulse data indicated that geographically, Andaman and Nicobar Islands registered the highest jump in P2M transactions with a 29 per cent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) increase in this period.

Also, 16 states and union territories witnessed over 100 per cent growth in merchants onboarded in 2021 vs 2020, bearing testimony to the increasing acceptance of digital payments across India.

Merchants in Uttar Pradesh lead the adoption numbers as per PhonePe Pulse data, followed by Maharashtra, Karnataka, West Bengal, and Rajasthan, comprising 49 per cent of the merchants in the platform’s network.