Mobile wallet transactions hit record ₹14,632 crore in June, shows RBI data

New Delhi: The value of transactions made through mobile wallets touched a record ₹14,632 crore in June, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data released on Tuesday showed, rising 4.2% from ₹14,047 crore in May.

However, the number of transactions fell around 5% to 309.62 million in June after reaching an all-time high of 325.41 million in May.

The record transaction value shows wallet companies, which were struggling to set up compliance infrastructure and convince users to provide know-your-customer (KYC) documents, have survived the storm and signed up new customers.

The value of mobile wallet transactions fell from a peak of ₹13,104 crore in February to ₹10,097 crore in March, the data showed.

“With an increase in the number of merchant payment use cases for mobile wallets beyond traditional recharge/bill pay to shopping including promotions on wallet usage, the customers prefer to load their wallets at one go with a larger amount instead of 3-4 times small amount of loading and use them on shopping transactions which are of relatively larger value than recharges/bill pay transactions,” said Sunil Kulkarni, joint managing director at Oxigen Services (India) Pvt. Ltd, a mobile wallet and payment solutions company.

This could be one of the factors influencing absolute volume to decline a bit but the ticket-size of transactions to go up, leading to higher value of total wallet transactions, he said.

The central bank’s directive that all wallet issuers follow strict KYC guidelines starting 1 March caused considerable disruption, as customers struggled to get their KYC done amid inadequate infrastructure.

Guidelines on interoperability, awaited for several months, are expected to be issued soon by RBI. It is likely to increase the use cases for mobile wallet customers and bring it on par with banks.

Debit and credit card transactions too hit a new record of ₹3.62 trillion in June, up by around 1% from ₹3.59 trillion in the previous month. However, the volume of card transactions declined by 5.3% to 1172.75 million in June from 1,238.58 million in May.

The volume of transactions through mobile banking yet again reached a peak in June, crossing the 300 million mark for the first time.

Transactions went up by around 14% to 306.42 million in June from 267.78 million in the previous month. The value of transactions increased to ₹1.9 trillion in June from ₹1.7 trillion in May.

Payments using real-time gross settlement (RTGS) fell marginally by around 0.5% to 11.43 million in June from 11.49 million in the preceding month.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.