Digital Payments in Nepal: QR, Wallets & connectIPS Statistics Hub

Digital payment in Nepal has moved from novelty to norm in barely half a decade. According to Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), the central bank, the total value of electronic (non-cash) payment transactions climbed from roughly Rs 34.42 trillion in fiscal year (FY) 2020/21 to about Rs 98.43 trillion in FY 2024/25, a rise of nearly 71 percent in that single final year. On a per-capita basis, a country of about 29 million people now moves several times its annual gross domestic product through digital rails each year.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 (roughly BS 2077-2078) was the turning point. Lockdowns pushed households and shops toward contactless payment, and the habit stuck once restrictions lifted. NRB's Payment Systems Department, which oversees and licenses these systems, has recorded compounding double-digit growth in almost every category since, from QR scans to mobile banking to instant bank transfers.

Two structural forces underpin the boom. First, mobile and internet penetration is now near-universal: by mid-March 2026 NRB reported mobile-telephone penetration above 100 percent and 4G coverage reaching close to 90 percent of the population. Second, NRB has actively built shared infrastructure, most notably the NepalQR interoperable standard, so that a single QR sticker at a tea shop can accept payment from dozens of different apps rather than locking merchants into one provider.

QR (Quick Response) code payment is the visible face of cashless Nepal. NRB data show QR transaction value rose from about Rs 20.28 billion in FY 2020/21 to roughly Rs 500 billion in FY 2023/24, and further to about Rs 958 billion in FY 2024/25, an increase of nearly 50 times in five years. Transaction volume rose in step: from around 5.5 million QR transactions in FY 2021/22 to more than 160 million in FY 2023/24.

The number of QR codes deployed at merchants exploded from roughly 282,000 in mid-July 2021 to about 2.34 million by mid-January 2024. Between FY 2021/22 and FY 2023/24, QR transaction volume grew at an average of around 230 percent per year and value at about 210 percent, among the fastest growth of any payment instrument NRB tracks. QR's share of retail digital transactions rose from about 1 percent in FY 2020/21 to roughly 12 percent by FY 2023/24.

Two forces made QR ubiquitous. One is cost: a printed QR sticker costs the merchant almost nothing compared with a card point-of-sale (POS) terminal, so even street vendors and rural shops adopt it. The other is interoperability, discussed below, which means a customer using one bank's app can pay a merchant enrolled with a completely different bank or wallet.

Mobile banking is the workhorse of everyday digital payment in Nepal. NRB reported mobile-banking users at about 24.65 million in FY 2023/24, up roughly 15 percent year on year, and the figure reached about 29.4 million by mid-March 2026. The value moved through mobile banking grew more than tenfold in five years, from around Rs 460 billion in FY 2020/21 to about Rs 5.02 trillion in FY 2024/25.

Mobile wallets, run by licensed Payment Service Providers such as eSewa, Khalti and IME Pay, are a parallel and complementary channel aimed at smaller, faster payments and users who may not hold a full bank account. Wallet users roughly quadrupled from about 6.27 million in mid-August 2020 to about 23.46 million by mid-July 2024. Because a single person often holds both a bank app and one or more wallets, these totals count instruments rather than unique individuals.

Internet (web) banking remains the smallest of the retail channels, with about 1.92 million users in FY 2023/24 rising to roughly 2.37 million by mid-March 2026. Meanwhile the cash side is shrinking in relative terms: the share of transactions represented by ATM cash withdrawals fell from about 16.4 percent in FY 2020/21 to under 10 percent by FY 2023/24, a clear marker of the shift away from cash.

Behind the consumer apps sits Nepal Clearing House Limited (NCHL), a public limited company established on 23 December 2008 (BS 2065) under the leadership of Nepal Rastra Bank. NCHL operates the country's core interbank clearing and instant-payment infrastructure, including the connectIPS e-payment system and the NEPALPAY family of interoperable services.

connectIPS is a real-time retail payment platform that lets customers of member banks and financial institutions move money between accounts directly, without a wallet in between, via web portal, mobile app, payment gateway and open APIs. It is widely used for salary and vendor payments, bill payments and, increasingly, Government of Nepal revenue and tax payments. NRB recorded about 75.56 million connectIPS transactions in FY 2023/24, up roughly 49.5 percent from the previous year, making it one of the fastest-growing account-to-account rails.

NEPALPAY QR is NCHL's implementation of the NepalQR interoperable standard published by NRB. Rather than being an app itself, it is the network layer that lets a merchant's single QR be paid from many different issuing platforms, more than 30 banks, wallets and apps, including the connectIPS app. NEPALPAY QR has also been made interoperable with Fonepay's SmartQR, so that in practice most Nepali QR stickers can be scanned by most Nepali payment apps regardless of provider.

Fonepay Payment Service Ltd., licensed by NRB as a Payment System Operator, is the largest payment network by merchant reach, connecting dozens of partner banks and, by its own account, over 1.7 million merchants nationwide. Together, NCHL's NEPALPAY QR and Fonepay's SmartQR form the two poles of Nepal's interoperable QR ecosystem.

One of the most significant recent developments is cross-border QR payment between Nepal and India. From around March 2024, Indian nationals visiting Nepal have been able to scan Nepali merchant QR codes using their Indian Unified Payments Interface (UPI) apps such as PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm, settling in Indian rupees. The link was built through NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), the overseas arm of India's National Payments Corporation, working with Nepal Clearing House Limited and Fonepay.

Uptake has been rapid. NRB and Fonepay reported that in roughly the first year, Indian users completed over one million UPI transactions in Nepal worth more than Rs 2 billion, spread across more than 100,000 Fonepay-enrolled merchants in all 77 districts. For Nepal's tourism-heavy border towns and trekking hubs, this removed a long-standing friction for Indian visitors, who make up the single largest group of foreign arrivals.

Reciprocity, however, remains one-way as of mid-2025. Nepali citizens still cannot scan Indian merchant QR codes to pay in India; repeated target dates in late 2024 and early 2025 were missed, with officials citing unresolved commission and cost-sharing arrangements between the two sides. A separate peer-to-peer cross-border remittance link between UPI and Nepal's National Payments Interface has also been advanced to let workers send money home instantly, though the merchant-payment reciprocity for travelling Nepalis was still pending at the time of writing.

Nepal Rastra Bank's Payment Systems Department is the licensing and oversight authority. It classifies operators into Payment System Operators (PSOs), which run networks and switches such as Fonepay and Nepal Clearing House Limited, and Payment Service Providers (PSPs), which offer consumer-facing wallets and gateways such as eSewa, Khalti and IME Pay. By mid-March 2026 NRB reported roughly eight PSOs and around 21 PSPs in operation. The authoritative figures come from NRB's annual Payment Systems Oversight Report and its monthly payment statistics.

A few cautions help when reading digital-payment statistics. User counts generally measure registered instruments, not unique people, so a single person with a bank app and two wallets is counted several times; totals therefore overstate the number of distinct users. Values are nominal rupee figures and are not adjusted for inflation, and headline growth rates are inflated partly by rising prices and by counting high-value interbank flows alongside tiny retail scans.

Fiscal years in Nepal run from mid-July to mid-July (for example, FY 2024/25 corresponds roughly to 16 July 2024 to 16 July 2025, or BS 2081/82), and NRB often reports monthly cut-offs at Nepali-month ends, so figures labelled 'mid-July' or 'mid-January' align to those boundaries rather than to Gregorian month ends. Because these numbers are revised and updated periodically, always check the latest NRB report for the current figure before quoting a specific value.