India: AI to Help UPI Payment System Reach One Billion Transactions a Day

The UPI (Unified Payment Interface) payment system already processes more than 750 million transactions a day, and that is not yet its limit. Dilip Asbe, head of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), said at the Mumbai Tech Week conference that artificial intelligence will be the main tool for reaching the next milestone: one billion operations a day.

A scale that is hard to picture

UPI launched in 2016 essentially from scratch. In ten years, the system has grown from an experimental project into one of the largest retail payment infrastructures in the world. Today it carries more than 60% of all cashless retail transactions in India, roughly 24 billion operations a month.

For perspective: the combined daily transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard worldwide is about 600–700 million. India alone has exceeded that figure in its domestic market.

The foundation of the success is an open-platform model. NPCI developed the protocols and standards, and private companies, including PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm and hundreds of others, build their own products on top of them. This architecture has reached hundreds of millions of users, including people who got access to financial services for the first time through UPI rather than through a traditional bank.

What AI is supposed to change

At Mumbai Tech Week, Asbe described specific areas where AI should help speed up growth and improve the service:

• Personalization: adapting financial products to different user groups: students, the self-employed, farmers, small business owners
• Anti-fraud: precise detection of fraudulent transactions in real time without needlessly blocking legitimate payments
• Credit scoring: assessing creditworthiness from UPI transaction history for people with no traditional credit history
• Voice interfaces: broader payment access for users with limited literacy and rural residents, in regional languages
• Predictive scaling: automatic management of infrastructure load during holidays and peak shopping periods

NPCI's key intention is to build AI directly into the platform's infrastructure layer, rather than shifting that responsibility to individual apps. All participants in the ecosystem would then get a smarter service at once, without having to invest in their own AI development.

International expansion will add volume

Alongside domestic traffic growth, India is actively pushing UPI into foreign markets. The system already operates in the UAE, Singapore, France, the United Kingdom, Nepal and Sri Lanka. NPCI International, created specifically for international expansion, is in talks with dozens more countries. The share of international transactions is currently small, but it is growing fast with the Indian diaspora and tourist flows.

Analysts believe the international segment could make a noticeable contribution to total volume well before the AI tools reach full effect.

What this means

India has built a payment infrastructure that other countries increasingly use as a model: similar systems inspired by UPI are being developed in Brazil, Saudi Arabia and several African states. If NPCI manages to build AI in at the protocol level, and not only in individual apps, it will change expectations across the whole industry.

One billion transactions a day is no longer a hypothetical goal but a question of timing.