Google Pay was reportedly the most downloaded Fintech app (globally) during the month of February 2020 with 15.6 million downloads. It was closely followed by Indian digital payments firm PhonePe’s app which was downloaded 6 million times.
For Google Pay, this is notably more than a 2X growth in total downloads when compared to February 2019. The widely-used payments app got 83.6% of its downloads from consumers based in India. Around 5.7% of Google Play downloads were from Russia.
Meanwhile, PhonePe app’s total downloads increased by 39.5% when compared to February 2019. Nearly all (99.3%) of the digital payment app’s downloads were from India.
Sensor Tower’s report includes total downloads for both the App Store and Google Play (globally) from February 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020.
The growth and adoption of both Fintech apps has been supporting India’s growing digital payments industry and ecosystem – which is largely based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
In February 2020, UPI handled 1.32 billion transactions and recorded the highest growth rate ever during a 1 month period since its launch.
Google Pay and PhonePe lead all UPI supporters. They were followed closely by other local Fintech firms such as Paytm and various other competitors.
Alipay, Cash App, and PayPal were the other three major digital payments firms that rounded up the top five list of most frequently downloaded Fintech apps globally for the month of February.
Paytm-backed PayPay (a joint initiative supported by SoftBank and Yahoo Japan Corp.) and Google Pay for Business were ranked among the top 10 most downloaded payments apps.
More than likely, the figures for March and April 2020 will be significantly impacted by the deadly Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which has led to governments enforcing strict lockdowns in order to prevent the further spread of the highly contagious virus.
People’s everyday routines and lives have drastically changed due to these lockdowns and curfews. An increasing number of vendors operating during the crisis now prefer to accept digital or contactless payments in order to minimize the spread of the Coronavirus.
