Indian consumers prefer digital payments over cash, ACI study finds

YouGov and ACI Worldwide have conducted a study revealing that 42% of Indian consumers prefer digital payments.

While preference for digital payments – including eWallet and UPI payments – is more pronounced with younger consumers (42% for Gen Z and 48% for Millennials), the survey revealed a more consistent picture across age groups in terms of adoption. 77% of Millennials had used digital payments at least once during the festival season, compared to 72% of Gen Z and 69% of Gen X. Nearly half (45%) of Baby Boomers also indicated they had used digital payments within the survey period.

44% of respondents used digital payment methods for low-value payment (less than 1,000 INR) via a merchant website (ecommerce) or app (P2M), indicative of the progress made by digital payments in the merchant channel. However, banks, fintechs and merchants should be aware that 40% of those surveyed consider data privacy as a top area of concern when it comes to digital payments.

Other key findings and trends are:

• 43% of respondents used digital payment methods regularly (at least 2-3 times per week) during the festival period, with 15% purchasing this way once or more per day.

• 32% have not used cash for festival season purchases, indicating that for some, festival season spending is becoming a largely cashless affair.

• Only one in ten respondents (10%) claimed to have not made a digital payment method at all in the period leading up to Diwali.

• Peer-to-peer (P2P) payments were made by 36% of respondents for low-value payments (less than 1,000 INR) and 37% for high-value payments (more than 1,000 INR) during the festival season.

As per data released by NPCI, UPI transactions hit an all-time high of 955.02 million in September 2019 as compared to 918.35 million in August 2019. There has been a 135% YoY increase in the number of transactions and UPI is soon expected to cross one billion monthly transactions.