71.1% of India's payments to be digital in 2025: Report

The collective digital payments in India would reach 71.1 per cent of total payments in the country by 2025, says a report by US-based electronic payment company ACI Worldwide and data analytics and consulting company GlobalData released on Wednesday. Instant payments and other electronic payments would rise to 37.1 per cent and 34.6 per cent, respectively, leaving paper-based transactions at 28.3 per cent, the report adds. The share of real-time payments volume in overall electronic transactions will exceed 50 per cent in 2024.

The report says that in 2020, the transaction volume share stood at 15.6 per cent and 22.9 per cent for instant payments and electronic payments, respectively, while paper-based payments stand at 61.4 per cent.

"India's journey of creating a digital financial infrastructure has been characterised by collaboration between the government, the regulator, banks and fintechs," Kaushik Roy, VP and head of product management, Asia, Middle East and Africa, ACI Worldwide, said in a statement. "This has helped to advance the country's goal of enabling financial inclusion and also provided rapid payments digitisation for citizens. The pandemic has further accelerated adoption of digital payments with many first-time users adopting digital payments and significant uplift by merchants." He added.

The mobile wallet transactions hit a record volume of 46 per cent of total transactions in 2020, which was 40.6 per cent in 2019 and 18.9 per cent in 2018. This is due to the sudden change in people's work and livelihood globally, the report says. It adds that countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Malaysia, which primarily relied on cash, are now changing fast to mobile wallets.

More than 70.3 billion real-time payment transactions were processed globally in 2020, says the report. This marks a 41 per cent surge compared to 2019. Because of Covid 19 pandemic spread, the real-time transactions accelerated, overtaking cash and cheques.