Mumbai: Digital transactions for the month of December 2017 are 11% higher than the figure for December 2016, when transactions had shot up due to a withdrawal of cash from the system due to demonetisation .

According to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India ( NPCI ), total electronic payment transactions crossed 1 billion in December 2017 to 1.06 billion compared to 957 million a year earlier. In value terms, the total transactions amounted to Rs 125.53 lakh crore, 20% higher than Rs 104 lakh crore last year.

Transactions in most segments were higher than the earlier year, except card payments. Payments using debit and credit cards fell to 263 million in December 2017 as compared to 311 million in December 2016. In value terms, however, card payments amounted to Rs 52,800 crore compared to Rs 52,200 crore in the previous year. The bump up in the number of digital transactions came from payments made using the Unified Payments Interface ( UPI ). Transactions using this account-to-account transfer platform rose 2 million to 145 million.

According to bankers, transactions on the UPI platform has got a big boost due to the entry of Google Tez and Paytm , which were running promotion campaigns to get users to switch to their platform.

