While promoting the platform for broader international adoption, India intends to add hundreds of millions of new users to its real-time payments system, the Unified Payments Interface.

Through programs like designated accounts for kids and domestic workers who might not have access to traditional bank accounts, the National Payments Corporation of India hopes to attract an additional 200 million to 300 million Indians to UPI to "break their cash memory," according to Dilip Asbe, its managing director and chief executive.

In the last five years, the domestic payments network has revolutionized the way over 450 million retail customers use their cellphones to pay for anything from a cup of tea to vacations. Currently, there are no transaction costs associated with the little to large sums of money that users can pay from their bank accounts by scanning merchant QR codes. 

According to a PwC analysis, UPI has become so popular that, after a 90-fold increase in retail digital payments over the previous 12 years, India now accounts for roughly 46% of global digital transactions. Stakeholders including the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the NPCI, and the central bank of India, are now trying to build on that success by promoting the platform abroad. Asbe stated, "The goal is to make remittances to all the diaspora very affordable and real-time."

 Worldwide Growth


According to Asbe, the delegated accounts and NPCI's domestic focus are both on extending UPI's multilingual and conversational chat capabilities to increase accessibility. In order to promote increased use of UPI for parking payments, the organisation is testing vision recognition technology, he continued.
Additionally, it is investigating methods to broaden its loan portfolio for retail clients. Although UPI currently provides small-ticket loans, Asbe thinks that its architecture could improve collections and assist lenders in determining whether to grant credit based on borrower payback patterns.

In the next three to five years, the credit-as-a-service model will also develop and gain some traction, according to Asbe.

Asbe claims that the Indian government has enlisted the aid of its embassies overseas to promote UPI, and the RBI has contacted a number of nations to promote the platform.

According to a World Bank estimate, the diaspora sent a record $129 billion back to India in 2024, the most any nation has ever received in a single year.


According to Asbe, in addition to remittances, UPI might facilitate money flow in the opposite direction, such as assisting Indians in funding their study abroad.

The Indian government has made agreements with countries like Singapore and the United Arab Emirates that have a sizable Indian population, but it has not yet made progress with Western countries like the US, UK, or Australia.

"Because other nations are at a different stage of real-time payments system stabilisation, it might take some time," Asbe continued.
The issue of whether or not users should be charged for digital payments remains a possible obstacle despite the huge increase in UPI transactions. The Merchant Discount Rate (MDR), a fee that banks receive from retailers at the point of sale in order to process transactions, is at the centre of the controversy.
In 2020, the government eliminated the 30-basis-point MDR that UPI payments previously had in order to hasten the platform's uptake. Incentives were introduced to cover operating costs in order to reward merchants, but they fell from 36 billion rupees in 2024 to 15 billion rupees the following year. 

A move like that might put a stop to UPI's expansion. According to a recent LocalCircles study with 32,000 participants, 73% of UPI users would discontinue their use of the service in the event that a transaction fee was implemented.

In order to make the platform feasible, the UPI ecosystem is collaborating with the government and RBI "by creating a small fee for the large merchants," according to Asbe.

 

You might also be interested in - Digital records to track hidden money: Nirmala Sitharaman