The Unified Payment Interface (UPI) could not have been built if the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had not built the product out of Mumbai, according to Dilip Asbe, managing director and chief executive officer of NPCI.
“I don’t think building it (UPI) would not have been possible if it was not for Mumbai,” said Asbe, at the Mumbai Tech Week on February 18.
This comes at a time when entrepreneurs in the financial capital of the country are uniting together to boost and promote the tech ecosystem in the city.
The NPCI chief also said that being in Mumbai facilitated building UPI since during the process several infrastructure requirements needed in-person interactions with the regulators and with the banks.
“We were organising design sessions which were attended by many fintechs and many banks. I still remember that it was like an evolution happening day by day and month by month. And everything that followed including compliance and legal services requirements was rightly available here as well,” said Asbe while speaking at a panel with Jay Kotak, co-head of Kotak811, and MN Srinivasu, co-founder and director of BillDesk.
Kotak agreed and added that with both regulators and capital markets present in the city it is more convenient for founders building in regulated spaces to engage and interact with them.
“The number one thing is talent, and that's why I'm really excited because I think that it's young people, it's people that are the real customers of our product. No better place to do that,” said Kotak.
In addition, NPCI’s Asbe added that the true total addressable market for UPI is 100 billion transactions a month during the panel that was discussing India’s potential to go completely cashless.
Asbe added that NPCI has been recording about 10 billion transactions a month and can clock another eight to nine times of growth.
This also comes as transactions through the unified payments interface (UPI) platform crossed the 100 billion-mark in calendar year 2023 to close at around 118 billion, as per the data shared by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
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