The United Payments Interface, which started as an experiment that hoped to move India's population from the age-old cash economy to the reliability of the digital payment infrastructure, has been quite successful in its planning and execution. In fact, UPI has continued to dominate the digital payment infrastructure in India, clocking in transactions worth $103 billion in October 2021.
This momentous growth in the popularity of UPI was witnessed in the last few years and has been attributed to various factors. One of the largest contributing factors remains the Coronavirus pandemic and its resulting lockdown that gripped the country for the last two years. With people stuck at home, with little access to the outside world, the UPI rose as the best alternative to the cash-based economy that most people relied upon.
Even with the lockdown now open, most people that have become used to the UPI interface, now no longer want to go back to hunting down ATMs for just a bit of local shopping, especially since most vendors now accept UPI and all its third-party apps.
How has UPI affected the growth of real money gaming?
Quite similar to the digital payments industry, real money gaming has also had a few good years – the sector has seen immense growth since 2020, which has continued into 2021. Yet again, the pandemic can be given some credit.
The dependency on real money gaming increased manifold during the lockdown periods when people with limited entertainment options began to rely on playing real money gaming apps. Additionally, the greater availability of smartphones, cheaper and more reliable data packs, as well as an increase in disposable income has made real money gaming an even more attractive entertainment option for a large section of the population that was previously unaware of them.
However, the real game-changer can be the popularity and wide usage of UPI and similar digital payment methods to play these real money games. For example, most online lottery websites in India accept UPI in order to make it easy for the user to deposit money safely and quickly.
In fact, even rummy and poker apps now allow UPI payments as well as withdrawals, depending on whether the user has won any prizes. Since real money gaming apps rely largely on the ability of the user to deposit and withdraw money, the integration of UPI and similar methods such as Indian Netbanking has allowed the industry to flourish to a large extent.
Another upside of UPI integration with real money gaming is that a large section of the Indian society that was previously unable to play these games due to lack of online payment options are now signing up on these apps to play. This has enabled a large number of entirely new users to enter the Indian real money gaming market.
In turn, the real money gaming industry may have also helped UPI gain some new users, due to the urge of people to play for real money online and try and win money while also being entertained by these gaming apps!
