Flipkart’s PhonePe slams Paytm, questions claims on UPI transactions

Flipkart’s payments platform PhonePe on Thursday slammed rival Paytm alleging that the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led company’s claims about leadership in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions were “unidimensional and misleading”.

In a blogpost, PhonePe said while Paytm “seems to be leading the market” in terms of number of transactions, the average value of such transactions is much lower at Rs 40 compared to its own ATV (average transaction value) of Rs 1,800.

PhonePe clarified that data around Paytm’s ATV and Average Transactions per Customer (ATPC) was not available.

However, based on the 21 million money transfer transactions made by Paytm customers to PhonePe users, the Bengaluru-based company had found that 40,000 unique consumers had done over 500 transactions each in February bringing the average transaction for Paytm to less than Rs 40.

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When contacted, a Paytm spokesperson declined to comment.

Paytm had earlier this week issued a statement claiming leadership position on the UPI platform.

PhonePe alleged that Paytm’s transaction volumes are “clearly influenced by significant per-transaction cashback incentives that appeal to a very small population”.

It further said that its calculations reflect that broad-based adoption of UPI has not happened on Paytm and that transaction numbers for customers do not reflect typical UPI use cases.

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“For these combination of reasons, we believe that Paytm’s claim that they are the largest on UPI is both uni-dimensional and misleading,” it said in the blog titled ‘All that Glitters is not Gold’.

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma had recently alleged that payments body National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had been arm-twisted by social media giant, Facebook, to give preferential treatment to messaging app WhatsApp for the launch of peer-to-peer payments based on UPI on the platform.

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