Overall ecosystem looking at strategy of migration of low-ticket transactions to UPI Lite, says NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe

Dilip Asbe, CEO, NPCI (file photo)

India’s overall payments ecosystem is looking at strategy of migration of low-ticket transactions to the UPI Lite, said Dilip Asbe, managing director and chief executive officer of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

"As the time passes, low-ticket transactions must be migrated to UPI Lite is the strategy the overall ecosystem is looking at," Asbe said at 11th SBI Banking & Economics Conclave 2024 on November 19.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on October 9 increased the transaction limit of UPI123 Pay to Rs 10,000 from Rs 5,000 earlier. “To further encourage wider adoption of UPI and make it more inclusive, it has been decided to enhance the per-transaction limit in UPI123Pay from Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000,” RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said in his Monetary Policy Committee speech.

The central bank also increased the UPI Lite wallet limit from Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 and per-transaction limit for the same from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000.

Asbe also said that recently the RBI has increased the limit on UPI lite, hoping that it will drive transactions on UPI and reduce the load on banking infrastructure.

On the issue of technical declines, Asbe added that the same has reduced to 0.7-0.8 percent now, from 8-10 percent during the time when UPI had started.

"When we started the UPI, the technical declines were in the range of 8-10 percent and over the period there is a lot of efforts from ecosystem, especially banks to scale up the infra, so today we are 0.70-0.8 percent technical declines," Asbe said.

Further, he added that NPCI international is in talks with 10 other countries for the UPI and Rupay stack after partnering with five other countries.

As far as Rupay is concerned, the Rupay stack is happening in two countries - UAE and Mauritius, Asbe said.
“For UPI, we have signed up with two countries, the implementation is yet to start and may start in next few weeks’ time. With Namibia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Peru, the commercial agreements have been signed. So total five countries we are looking for deploying the stack,” he added.