Moving beyond digital payments, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the operator of Unified Payments Interface, is planning to add more muscle to the country's digital infrastructure by setting up a fourth subsidiary, NPCI Tech Solutions Ltd (NTSL).
In its June 2025 review, the International Monetary Fund spotlighted India's Unified Payments Interface as the world's most dominant retail instant-payment network, moving more transactions than any other system on the globe.
The amount involved in banking system frauds surged to Rs 21,515 crore in the first half of FY26, up 30 per cent from the same period last year, even as the number of frauds fell 2.8 times to 5,092.
It will enable real-time intel sharing among banks and other financial sector participants to strengthen customer protection against digital fraud.
Users experienced difficulties with UPI payments due to technical issues in some banks' systems. NPCI stated that its systems are operational and it is working with banks to resolve the problems.
As India's biggest Unified Payments Interface (UPI) app PhonePe prepares to list, the updated draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) shows the impact of regulations on the business, and concentration of payments-linked revenue even as UPI lacks MDR (merchant discount rate).
Eying benefits from digital banking, lenders are now looking at building Unified Recovery Interface (URI) for enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and getting good prices for properties of defaulters. This would be managed by PSB Alliance Ltd, a company set up by all public sector banks in the country. M V Rao, chairman, Indian Banks' Association (IBA), said: "Till now we had Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a product developed by National Payments Corporation Ltd (NPCI).
About 85 per cent of the digital payment transactions take place through UPI in India, and the country can be a case study in inclusive, secure, and scalable Digital Public Platforms (DPPs), Reserve Bank Governor Sanjay Malhotra has said. He was speaking at a "High-Level Dialogue on Forging Economic Resilience through Digital Public Platforms" organised by RBI on the sidelines of the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC on Tuesday.
This would imply a 29 per cent year-on-year rise, significantly lower than growth rates seen in recent years.
'This will bring in a lot of net new users to UPI.'
'Just like oral hygiene, cyber hygiene must become a daily habit,' says Beena Vaheed, executive director, Bank of Baroda. 'It is not enough to rely only on banks, companies, or the government. Each of us must play our part.'
India has nearly 490 million online gamers, and an estimated Rs 10,000 crore is spent every month on online gaming transactions.
Officials from both India and the US in the recent past have indicated that a "fair deal" will be concluded soon, with Indian officials holding that more formal rounds of talks are not needed.
UPI crossed 20 billion monthly transactions for the first time in August 2025, with a transaction value of Rs 24.85 trillion.
'There is a debit execution failure which is because there is not enough money in the user's bank account.'
Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm may deliberately delay transactions, issue fraud alerts, and require an extra layer of user confirmation before processing any transactions that are likely to be classified as fraudulent.
'When you think of cross-border payments, the first things that come to mind are risk, compliance, taxation, speed, and cost.'
SBI customers faced difficulties in accessing UPI and mobile banking services for more than four hours on Tuesday due to some "technical issues". The country's largest lender later said the technical issues have been fully resolved.
'The first time India has seen two consecutive blockbuster IPO years.'
With a confident new generation of innovators, India now has the scale and self-belief to shape its own digital destiny marked by creation, observes Ajay Kumar chairman, UPSC.
As deposit growth lags credit expansion, Indian banks face shrinking low-cost Casa inflows, rising funding costs, and structural shifts driven by UPI, e-Kuber, and digital savings trends, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will launch the Unified Lending Interface (ULI) nationwide in due course, aiming to transform India's lending sector, similar to how the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) revolutionised the payments ecosystem, Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Monday.
Nearly 7 out of every 10 P2M UPI transactions take place in high frequency categories like groceries, restaurants, pharmacies, fuel service stations, bakeries and utility services such as electricity, gas, water and sanitation.
In a significant breakthrough, the Malerkotla Police apprehended two individuals for alleged involvement in espionage activities linked to a Pakistani official posted at the High Commission in New Delhi, said Punjab Director General of Police (DGP) on Sunday.
To digitise Customs processes, the Union finance ministry is planning to integrate the Indian Customs Electronic Gateway (ICEGATE), Risk Management System (RMS), and Indian Customs Electronic Data Interchange System (ICES) into a single unified national Customs platform, according to government sources.
'The real story of 2025 is that India officially stopped being a 'market of the future' and started acting as the world's primary economic engine.'
This marks a 67% increase from the Rs 2,537 crore lost in scams in 2022-2023.
Mobile wallet adoption is surging in India and swiftly becoming a primary payment option, surpassing traditional methods like cash and cards. Over the next few years, payments via mobile wallets in India are likely to surpass the Rs 531.8 trillion mark in 2028, witnessing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.3 per cent between 2024 and 2028, according to GlobalData - a London-based leading data and analytics company. The value of mobile wallet payments in India, as per a GlobalData report, grew at a CAGR of 72.1 per cent between 2019 and 2023 to reach Rs 202.8 trillion ($2.5 trillion) in 2023.
Reserve Bank Governor Sanjay Malhotra on Wednesday exhorted the fledgling fintech ecosystem to focus on the underserved sections of the society to deepen financial inclusion. Speaking at the annual Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, Malhotra accepted that serving the "privileged" will be a lucrative business, but urged the smaller companies to focus on the underserved.
'The introduction of a reasonable MDR for large merchant transactions will allow the industry to continue investing in innovation, cybersecurity, grievance redressal, and merchant support, ultimately ensuring that UPI continues to thrive.'
UPI topped Rs 24 trillion in value of transactions and 19 billion in volume for the first time after becoming operational in April 2016.
The average value of retail digital payments dropped 48 per cent from Rs 8,769 in March 2021 to Rs 4,560 in March 2024 due to a growing preference to use digital modes of transactions for small value payments, according to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) report on the trend and progress of banking in India.
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday said there is no charge for the bank account to bank account-based UPI payments or normal UPI payments.
Several executives argue that UPI has the potential to grow tenfold, but warn that the absence of a monetisation model risks stagnating the real-time payments system, which has been recording all-time-high transaction volumes every year.
'Reinvention is not a hugely difficult task. With technology as available today, you can reinvent yourself pretty quickly.'
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday asked fintech firms to focus on risk management at a time when criminals are using AI to mimic voices, clone identities and create lifelike videos to manipulate people.
Let's work flat out and create a policy framework that fosters the growth of Indian non-family business VC and private equity firms. This will allow our Indian startups' dreams to flourish, explains Ajit Balakrishnan.
In FY24 alone, 1.34 million fraud cases were reported, amounting to losses of Rs 1,087 crore.
India is pushing for greater disclosures by credit card companies, fintech firms, and payment aggregators (PAs) at the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), so that the sender and recipient in a cross-border financial transaction can be easily identified and the information shared with law enforcement agencies. Separately, the inter-governmental group, which sets standards to curb money laundering, will release the fourth round of its mutual evaluation report on India on September 19. FATF in June had adopted the mutual evaluation report on India and placed the country in the "regular follow-up" category - the highest rating given by the global watchdog and a distinction shared by only four other G20 countries.
Online fraudsters are widely targeting Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions to dupe people and carry out unauthorised transactions, making it the most prevalent form of online financial fraud during 2020-2023, said a whitepaper on cybercrime trends.
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