India saw a whopping Rs 7.7 lakh crore (over $100 billion by value) digital transactions via unified payments interface (UPI) in October for the first time, according to latest data released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Monday.

In the month of October that saw record festive shopping across e-commerce platforms, digital payments witnessed 4.2 billion UPI transactions in total.

In September, the NPCI recorded digital payments worth Rs 6.54 lakh crore via 3.65 billion UPI transactions.

Currently, PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm are the leaders in the digital payments space. PhonePe registered digital transactions worth Rs 3.06 lakh crore and Google Pay Rs 2.5 lakh crore in September.

PhonePe currently has over 325 million registered users. The platform is also accepted at over 22 million merchant outlets across India. A PhonePe Pulse study in September revealed that over 300 million Indians from 19,000 pin codes now use digital payments.

Four out of every five PhonePe monthly active users are from Tier 2 and 3 cities, and two out of every three users are from Tier-3 towns.

Over 63 per cent of first time transactions on the PhonePe app are to transfer money, confirming that this category acts as the initial hook for customers to download a UPI app.

PhonePe registered 182 per cent growth in transactions for this category and 72 per cent growth in customers between Q2 2020 and Q2 2021.

(With inputs from IANS)