Not Just Mobile Wallets, Transactions Made Using Cards, And Mobile Banking Reached Peak Volumes In May

The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) stringent know your customer (KYC) norms saw mobile wallet transactions drop sharply in March. However, the decline is now reversing, with wallet transactions for May touching 325.78 transactions, just a notch below the January record of 326.30 million transactions.

Wallet companies that struggled with compliance norms seem to have got their customers back. The value of transactions peaked at Rs 13,104 crore in February before falling to Rs 10,097 crore in March when the KYC norms were issued.

The value of transactions for May touched Rs 14,170 crore, a 21 per cent increase from April’s Rs 11,695 crore, reports Mint. The new KYC guidelines caused quite a disruption with customers struggling get theirs done with poor infrastructure among operators.

RBI is expected issue the guidelines for interoperability of wallets this month, which could very well see their use go up and come on par with that of payments banks.

A major reason considered for the rise of wallets is the cashback being offered by wallet companies for both completing the KYC process and performing transactions using credit or debit cards and the unified payments interface (UPI).

Card transactions have also seen peak usage, with a 1 per cent increase from 1,225.75 million in April to 1,238.58 million transactions in May. The corresponding value of transactions went up from Rs 33.55 trillion to Rs 33.59 trillion.

Mobile banking transactions meanwhile saw a 7 per cent jump from 250 million to 266.9 million during the same time period with the value of transactions going up from Rs 1.34 trillion to Rs 1.74 trillion. Payments using real time gross settlement (RTGS) went up from 10.6 million to 11.5 million, a rise of 8 percent.