India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), launched in 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has now surpassed the ‘Visa’ and has become the world’s largest real-time payment system, clocking over 650 million transactions daily. Surpassing the Visa’s reported FY 2024 average of around 639 million per day. In just nine years, UPI’s growth, handling over 18 billion transactions monthly, has transformed payments across socio-economic strata, enabling peer-to-peer and merchant transactions, QR code payments, and recurring bills via interoperable open-API architecture. This milestone not only underscores India’s dominance in the fintech sector but also signals a paradigm shift in global digital payment infrastructure.
According to former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, UPI’s achievement is “phenomenal”, reflecting how India’s digital infrastructure is reshaping everyday lives. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) Fintech Note also highlights UPI as a leading example of interoperable retail payment systems, suggesting its model could influence global digital finance standards.