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Mumbai: Digital payments will grow at a rapid pace over the next few years and account for a 71.7% share of all the payments in India by 2025, according to a report.

Cash and cheques, the other payment alternatives, will occupy only 28.3% share, the report by ACI Worldwide, which provides payment solutions to corporations, said.

The report claimed India was ahead of China with 25.5 billion real-time payments transactions in 2020, compared to the northern neighbour’s 15.7 billion.

Of the overall payments in 2020, instant payments accounted for a 15.6% share, 22.9% was other electronic payments and paper-based payments commanded a 61.4% share, it said.

By 2025, the same will change to instant payments becoming 37.1%, electronic payments becoming 34.6%, and cash and other paper-based payments’ share reducing to 28.3%, it said.

The share of real-time payments volume in overall electronic transactions will exceed 50 per cent in 2024, it said.

There is a collaboration between the government, the regulator, banks and fintechs in India, which has helped to advance the goal of enabling financial inclusion and also provided rapid payments digitisation for citizens, its Vice-President Kaushik Roy said.

As the pandemic continues to drive changes in consumer and business behaviours, banks, merchants and intermediaries across the payment ecosystem are responding rapidly, prioritising the shift to digital, the report said.

The global report said India, China, South Korea, Thailand and the UK rank in order as top-5 countries generating real-time transactions in 2020.

Mobile wallet adoption rose to an historic high of 46% in 2020, up from 40.6% in 2019 and 18.9% in 2018. Countries like Brazil, Mexico and Malaysia where many people historically relied on cash are now some of the fastest adopters of mobile wallets, it said.