Google Pay, one of India’s leading Unified Interface Payments (UPI) platforms has now introduced a convenience fee for bill payments made with credit and debit cards, according to an Economic Times report.

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This refers to bills such as electricity and cooking gas and the fees ranges from 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent of the transaction value, along with the applicable goods and services tax (GST).

This comes after Google Pay earlier made the decision to introduce a ₹3 convenience fee for mobile recharges more than a year back.

The move represents the slow shift to monetizing UPI transactions which have been free for a long time.

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Google Pay is currently India’s second largest UPI payments service in terms of both volume and value, with the largest being PhonePe, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

They are followed by Paytm, Navi and Cred respectively.

Users made 6.184 billion transactions using Google Pay with a combined value of ₹8.27 lakh crore, according to the NPCI.

The monetization push is to offset costs involved in processing such transactions and comes at a time when UPI adoption has grown significantly.

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The report cited a PwC analysis as saying that such payment providers incur costs of nearly 0.25 per cent of the transaction value for processing UPI person-to-merchant transactions.