Fintech / India ranks 1st in digital payment transactions globally: Report

New Delhi: Digital payments will grow at a rapid pace over the next few years and account for a 71.7 percent share of all the payments in India by 2025, a report said on Wednesday.

Cash and cheques, the other payment alternatives, will occupy only 28.3 percent share, the report by ACI Worldwide, which provides payment solutions to corporations, said.

The report claimed India was ahead of China with 25.5 billion real-time payments transactions in 2020, compared to the northern neighbour's 15.7 billion.

Of the overall payments in 2020, instant payments accounted for a 15.6 percent share, 22.9 percent was other electronic payments and paper-based payments commanded a 61.4 percent share, it said.

By 2025, the same will change to instant payments becoming 37.1 percent, electronic payments becoming 34.6 percent, and cash and other paper-based payments' share reducing to 28.3 percent, it said.

The share of real-time payments volume in overall electronic transactions will exceed 50 percent in 2024, it said.

There is a collaboration between the government, the regulator, banks, and fintechs in India, which has helped to advance the goal of enabling financial inclusion and also provided rapid payments digitisation for citizens, its Vice-President Kaushik Roy said.

As the pandemic continues to drive changes in consumer and business behaviours, banks, merchants and intermediaries across the payment ecosystem are responding rapidly, prioritising the shift to digital, the report said.

The global report said India, China, South Korea, Thailand and the UK rank in order as top five countries generating real-time transactions in 2020.

Mobile wallet adoption rose to a historic high of 46 percent in 2020, up from 40.6 percent in 2019 and 18.9 percent in 2018. Countries like Brazil, Mexico and Malaysia where many people historically relied on cash are now some of the fastest adopters of mobile wallets, it said.