Payment Gateways Like Razorpay, PayU Face Rs 30,000 Cr Blow As Real-Money Gaming Gets Banned

Payment gateways are bracing for up to a 15% hit in their annual top line growth as real-money gaming companies struggle in the wake of an act that brings their operations to a grinding halt.

Overall transaction volumes in India will take a hit of at least Rs 30,000 crore over the year, with smaller industry-specific companies facing the brunt of the ban, three industry insiders said on the condition of anonymity.

Close to 80% of the impacted volumes will be transactions that would otherwise have been routed through the Unified Payments Interface, one of the abovementioned persons explained.

In terms of volumes, 2% of UPI’s monthly transactions will take a hit, and 0.5% of the total transacted value will be affected, another industry insider aware of the matter said.

According to NPCI’s website, ‘Digital Goods: Games’ is a high transacting category, a large part of which includes real-money gaming transactions.

During the month of July, Rs 10,077 crore worth of payments were routed through UPI under the ‘Digital Goods: Games’ category. This made up 1.38% of the month’s total transaction values. For the same month, 35.1 crore transactions took place under the given category, making up 2.8% of the total transaction volumes.

This means that for UPI, the RMG ban will mean a loss of around 25 crore transactions worth Rs 5,040 crore in a month, the abovementioned person explained.

NDTV Profit has reached out to NPCI for comments on the story.