Paytm's claim of leadership in UPI payments misleading, says PhonePe

A week after Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm staked claim to being the country’s largest Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform, Flipkart’s digital payments arm PhonePe has hit back saying that Paytm’s claim of being the leader is "uni-dimensional and misleading".

In a blog post published on Thursday, PhonePe said that while Paytm had a larger volume of transactions on UPI, the average value per transaction on Paytm was paltry in comparison to its own. Moreover, PhonePe says the total value of UPI transactions it did in February was far higher than Paytm’s.

“We believe that the recent media narrative has been narrowly focussed only on UPI transaction volumes , which only tells half the story,” read the blogpost. “We believe that Paytm’s claim that they are the largest on UPI is both uni-dimensional and misleading.”

Paytm cornered 68 million out of 171 million total UPI transactions in February which translates to 40 per cent of the total transactions. PhonePe on the other hand managed 28 million transactions. However, the company said, the total value of transactions done on its platform at Rs 51.2 billion accounted for over a fourth of the total Rs 191.26 billion that was transacted through UPI in the same month.