Mumbai: India’s digital payments landscape is undergoing an unprecedented transformation, with Unified Payments Interface (UPI) emerging as the dominant force driving financial inclusion, merchant adoption, and cross-border transactions. According to an industry report, “Crafting the Future of Real-Time Payments: From Less Cash to Cashless” by The Digital Fifth, UPI now drives 84 percent of all digital transactions in India, solidifying its reputation as a technological marvel and a model for digital-first economies worldwide.
The report underscores UPI’s transformative impact on businesses and consumers while highlighting the critical infrastructure innovations needed to sustain this momentum as India progresses toward a cashless future.
According to the report, UPI transactions surged 4.4 times from 2021 to 2024, reaching 172 billion transactions annually. It now dominates digital payments, far outpacing card-based and wallet transactions. With over 30 million merchants onboarded on UPI, the merchant-to-consumer (P2M) segment is growing at 67 percent YoY, outpacing peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and signaling UPI’s transition into the primary retail payment system.
“As monthly UPI transactions hit 16 billion and are projected to reach 3 times by 2030, ensuring high-resilience, AI-driven fraud detection, and cloud-native transaction processing is critical to preventing system bottlenecks,” said the report.
