72% of Indians who earlier used their debit cards only for ATM cash withdrawals, now making debit card purchases 3 times a week – Walnut

• Delhi showed highest growth in overall cashless transactions

• Chennai’s cashless transactions growth impacted

Walnut, India’s leading personal finance app, has witnessed a big jump in cashless transactions across the country, and a doubling of transaction frequency from users who have turned cashless for first time, based on its user data.

Among Walnut users, 72% of those who had previously used their debit card only to withdraw cash from ATMs, and had never done a POS swipe or an online purchase, have now started making cashless purchases via debit cards. In a positive trend, their average cashless purchase frequency has gone up from 1.5 times per week in the initial period of demonetisation to 3 times per week in the second week of December 2016.

Commenting on this, Amit Bhor, co-founder Walnut said “It is heartening to see that not only are people turning cashless for the first time, but their average cashless transactions are also increasing week-on-week. This shows a growing confidence among users towards cashless payments. Even on Walnut, the bank-to-bank money transfer service has seen a 10x growth in number of transactions”.

Walnut also did an analysis of cashless payments in top 8 Indian metros, and found that Delhi users have shown the maximum increase with 500% jump in cashless transactions compared to pre-demonetisation, while Chennai has shown the lowest growth at 250% jump. Due to cyclone Vardah, the growth in cashless transactions seem to have stalled in the recent days in Chennai.

Walnut, which had last month launched the highly successful “Find an #ATMwithCash near you” feature on its app, helps users automatically track their expenses. Users can set a monthly budget on app and keep their finances under control, and send money to anyone for free using Walnut’s bank-to-bank money transfer feature.