India wallets crush cards with 68% online share

UPI helped push wallets ahead of every other online payment method in 2025.

India’s digital wallets continued to dominate online payments in 2025, helped by the rapid use of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Digital wallets accounted for 68% of e-commerce transaction value in 2025, according to Worldpay’s Global Payments Report 2026. 

Their share is forecast to rise to 78% by 2030. The report said India’s use of digital wallets is second only to China’s, mainly because of UPI-based payments.

UPI allows direct account-to-account payments and is now used by consumers through apps such as Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm. 

These brands are the leading digital wallet players in India. The National Payments Corporation of India is also working to expand cross-border payment interoperability.

Cards remained an important part of consumer payments, though their online share was much smaller than wallets. 

Cards accounted for 21% of e-commerce transaction value in 2025 and 22% of point-of-sale spending. Credit cards made up 16% of point-of-sale transaction value, while debit cards accounted for 4%.

Worldpay said credit cards are overused in India compared with the size of the market, making up more than a fifth of spending. 

By 2030, the share of credit cards is expected to fall to 15% in e-commerce and 12% at point of sale. 

Debit cards are expected to remain among the most-used funding sources for wallets, behind direct bank account payments through UPI.

Cash continued to lose ground. Its share of point-of-sale transaction value fell from 71% in 2019 to 14% in 2025. 

Worldpay expects cash to fall further to 9% by 2030. Online cash on delivery remains, but it accounted for an estimated 6% of online payment value in 2025.

India’s e-commerce payments market was valued at $165b in 2025 and is forecast to reach $328b by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 15%. 

The point-of-sale market stood at $1.6t in 2025 and is expected to rise to $2.3t by 2030, with an 8% compound annual growth rate.
Visa held the largest card scheme share in 2024 at 54%, followed by Mastercard at 31%, RuPay at 13% and American Express at 2%.