UPI has a 10X room for growth, only 10% penetration has happened: Dilip Asbe

After its launch in Singapore and France recently, UPI is likely to enter the North America market and other Middle-eastern countries in the coming months, Moneycontrol reported earlier.

Meanwhile, NPCI's international arm has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with France-based payments solution Lyra Networks to facilitate UPI transactions. Indian students, tourists and non-resident Indians (NRIs) in France can pay via UPI and RuPay using international mobile numbers at any terminal that is backed by Lyra Networks.

Talking about the ubiquitousness of DPIs in the financial sector, Federal Bank executive director Shalini Warrier cited the example of an experiment in Gujarat where cattle loans were disbursed on the basis of pouring history.

“Credit assessment is done through pouring history of the last one year that is accessed through APIs (application programming interfaces). And using that we pre-approve the loans. And the farmer can go to a marketplace and get a loan to buy cattle,” she said.

“I think banks like us can't even visualise life without Aadhaar, UPI now. It has become such an intrinsic part… We do about 8000-10,000 account openings a day and in a manual world it would not have been possible to do such a number because of a high cost burden,” she added.

Apart from Asbe and Warrier, Aadhaar architect Pramod Varma and Open Network for Digital Commerce chief T Koshy also participated in the panel discussion. Nikhil Kumar, co-founder of fintech API start-up Setu, moderated the conversation.

“I think the second order impact of UPI is account aggregator. Account Aggregator as an ecosystem would not exist if people were not doing digital transactions. This combinatorial innovation that is happening — Aadhaar leading to bank accounts, bank accounts leading to UPI, UPI leading to account aggregator, account aggregator to credit, and credit to commerce — means that we are in a beautiful flywheel,” he said.

At the Moneycontrol Start-up Conclave, Koshy of ONDC also said that the government-backed e-commerce network is working to bring financial products into the scheme of things, and this is expected to happen in the next couple of months.

Talking about ONDC, which is the newest kid on the DPI block, Varma said that while UPI only moves money, the opportunity for e-commerce is much larger because it can be an intermediary for trade in all categories.

"UPI is thin. It only moves money. The ONDC opportunity is truly wild... The effect of open networks is so large that eventually, it allows everyone in the world to participate and innovate," said Varma.