New Delhi, Apr 8 (IANS): The country's largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) and the umbrella body of retail and digital payments National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) have joined hands to launch a dedicated campaign to focus on deepening the reach of UPI transactions across all sections of the population.

The joint initiative aims at encouraging users of SBI's banking and lifestyle platform YONO to opt for UPI payments which is easy, safe and instantaneous.

Since its inception in 2017, YONO has observed 34 lakh UPI registrations with over 62.5 lakh transactions worth more than Rs. 2,520 crore at current daily average of nearly 27,000 transactions (in last 30 days).

Through this campaign both NPCI and SBI will put in efforts to on-board more customers into YONO platform and educate them about UPI's benefits so that there are more and more UPI users in the ecosystem, a statement announcing the initiative said.

Praveena Rai, COO, NPCI said, "Customers just need to know their UPI ID and use it so they can enjoy the convenience of making or receiving payment from their YONO app to any other bank or payment app. With this campaign, we aim to witness increasing numbers of UPI users which is a step further towards less-cash economy."

Ravindra Pandey, DMD (Strategy & Chief Digital Officer), SBI said: "UPI has been witnessing a strong month-on-month growth which is a testament of customers' willingness to adopt digital payments. In this FY, the YONO platform recorded 5.30 million transactions worth Rs 2,086 crore. UPI is currently one of the most preferred digital payment modes in India with more than 207 banks linked to it. The State Bank of India (SBI) was leading the segment by processing about 664.75 million transactions, as of January 2021."