Bullish on India | UPI will be key to accelerating India’s economy: NPCI CEO 

NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe

India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) will be key to accelerating the journey as the largest knowledge economy in the world with crucial support from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the government ecosystem, NPCI CEO said.

“UPI has 10X growth possible still from the very current base. The RBI, government and the ecosystem’s role will be super crucial to make it a reality. I believe UPI will be one of the key tools that shall accelerate India's journey to one of the best and largest knowledge economies in the world,” National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) CEO Dilip Asbe told Moneycontrol.

UPI has not only revolutionised and digitised India’s payments space, it has also created an ecosystem of fintech players to offer products on top of the platform and created multi-billion-dollar private enterprises.

In July, the number of UPI transactions almost hit the 10 billion mark (9.96 billion to be precise), and the value of those transactions crossed Rs 15 lakh crore. This is more than 10 times what credit cards achieved in over 30 years.

The NPCI, which runs UPI,  is now targeting one billion transactions a day, three times what it is doing now. That milestone seems to be only a couple of years away at the current annual growth rate of over 40 percent.

“As we hear the experts, global institutions and their review of the world’s growth outlook, probably India will be one of the few economies to grow at least 5 percent plus for the next couple of decades. Digital India will be the key bedrock to provide the majority of the services to our citizens at very affordable costs,” Asbe said.

The official data showed on May 31 that the Indian economy grew by 6.1 percent in January-March – well above expectations of 5.1 percent. As a result, the full-year GDP growth for 2022-23 is now estimated at 7.2 percent, 20 basis points higher than the statistics ministry's previous estimate of 7 percent.

Being said that we still need large investments into research and development (R&D), infrastructure and basic services like healthcare and education, he added.