Credit card UPI lifts RuPay volume mkt share to 38%

Homegrown credit card network RuPay has quietly wrestled market share from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, leveraging its exclusive access to India's fast payments network Unified Payments Interface or UPI.

- Subhana Shaikh & Shayan Ghosh

The three global networks have so far not been allowed to use UPI as an underlying payments platform.

RuPay credit card transactions on UPI currently account for 38% of all credit card transactions in India by volume and about 8% by value, shows data from Bernstein Securities report on 27 October. The brokerage did not mention a time period for this data.

The individual shares of Visa, MasterCard and Amex in the remaining 62% of the number of credit card transactions was immediately not available from Bernstein. Including transactions going through traditional payment networks, the value of RuPay credit card transaction rises to 18%, as per industry estimates.

"There is a definitive use case for RuPay credit cards because the acceptance universe of UPI is far bigger than the credit point-of-sale (PoS) machines," said Bikram Singh Yadav, business head of credit cards at RBL Bank, adding that no bank can avoid paying attention to the RuPay network.

Data for FY24 from Bernstein put RuPay credit card volumes and value at 10% and 1.8% respectively as a share of total credit card transactions. The numbers for fiscal 2025 are available only up to October 2024: 28% and 5.3% by volume and value.