Marking the third anniversary of Demonetization on November 8th, Velocity MR, a leading market research analysis company announced the results of their pan India study to understand the impact of demonetization in the past three years. The national study was conducted among a sample size of 2,100 respondents and covered prominent Indian cities including Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad Chennai, and Pune.

The study highlights that more than 50% of the respondents across cities felt that demonetization has had a positive impact on our economy. Demonetization was announced in 2016 and one of the primary reasons was the huge rise in the black money aided by the high-value notes in the circulation of the Indian Economy. This by consequence led to the digitization of the economy, given that cash transactions were banned overnight and people started looking for alternative ways to make payments.

During this note-ban period, the majority of the population took a shift to the adoption of digital payment methods through E-commerce platforms/E-wallets/Mobile wallets for their shopping and monetary transactions. The study observed that PayTM, GPay and PhonePe were leading the list in terms of high recall value in the digital transaction apps.

Highlights of the Study

81% people use E-commerce platforms and digital payment apps

PayTM, GPay and PhonePe are the top 3 apps in terms of usage, preference and frequency of the usage. Other apps like BHIM, Freecharge and Mobikwik come in the second league of awareness, usage and preference.

Other services like nearby deals/vouchers, games, buying gold, MF & Insurance are slowly getting into the picture

74% of the respondents have mentioned that Demonetization has driven the country towards a cashless society & adoption of alternate digital payment modes, e-wallets have increased over time, which is quite evident from the drastic growth of the e-wallets and other payment apps.

71% have stated demonetization has played an important role in curbing terrorism as it dealt a huge blow to the funding of terror in Jammu & Kashmir as well as Left-wing extremist violence across several states

About 67% of the respondents feel that demonetization did not affect people who had black money in the form of real estate, shares, gold, silver and foreign currency.

At an overall level, more than half of the people (55%) feel that demonetization has had a positive impact on our economy

Major issues related to these e-wallets/UPI apps are incomplete transactions & low-speed internet, which is stated by close to 50% of the respondents.

With the introduction to new instant credit/post-paid apps, players like Paytm Post-paid with 56% of awareness and 40% of usage, and Lazy Pay with

25% of awareness and 15% of usage, have topped the list of financial Apps with most awareness and usage.