India leads global real-time payments with 48.5% share in FY25, driven by UPI surge: RBI Annual Report

Unified Payment Interface (UPI) reached a record-high in March 2025

India accounted for 48.5 percent of real-time payment transactions worldwide, primarily driven by the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), according to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) Annual Report released on May 29.

UPI recorded a 41.7 percent increase in transaction volume and a 30.3 percent rise in value in FY25.

In March 2025 alone, UPI recorded its record-highest of 19.78 billion transactions, amounting to Rs 24.77 lakh crore in value.

Additionally, the number of UPI Quick Response (QR) codes saw a substantial increase of 91.5 percent, reaching 658 million by March 31, 2025.

The annual report said the RBI, in collaboration with NPCI International Payments (NIPL), is working towards expanding UPI's reach to 20 countries by FY29, aligning with the goals of 'Viksit Bharat 2047'.

The report said initiatives such as the ‘Delegated Payments’ feature under the Payments Vision 2025; launching the government-backed incentive scheme for low-value BHIM-UPI transactions drove this growth; expanding UPI QR code infrastructure by over 90 percent; and promoting the international footprint of RuPay cards, drove this growth.