The National Payments Corporation of India, which runs the popular UPI payments, has seen a 42 percent growth in standalone net profits that crossed Rs 1,500 crore during the financial year ending March 2025, data from rating agency ICRA shows.
NPCI, which manages most digital payment settlements in the country, reported a net profit of Rs 1,552 crore in FY 25 on a standalone basis, ICRA noted in its credit report. During FY 24, NPCI reported Rs 1,095 crore net profit.
These numbers are unaudited and provisional figures, and the financials will be made public after the audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. NPCI has not yet published any financial information for FY 25.
During the financial year ending March 2025, NPCI reported a standalone revenue of Rs 3,270 crore, compared with Rs 2,749 crore in FY 24, a growth of 19 percent.
NPCI did not offer any comments to Moneycontrol queries on the financials.
The backbone of digital payments
NPCI was established under the aegis of the banking regulator, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and is registered as a not-for-profit organisation. Hence, NPCI mentions net profit as surplus in the annual financial statement.
NPCI is owned by a consortium of banks. It also acts as the settlement house for IMPS, NACH and Aadhaar-based AePS.
The financial institution came under increased scrutiny recently after multiple UPI outages caused customer inconvenience over the last three months. UPI is the most popular mobile payment method in the country, cornering over 85 percent of all digital transactions in India.
The organisation’s hefty profits come even as most payment fintechs in the country are clamouring for payment commission called merchant discount rate (MDR) on UPI payments as they struggle to monetise the platform.
However, early this month, the finance ministry clarified that UPI will continue to be free of any MDR to promote digital payments. The payment companies insist that MDR is required to make the ecosystem sustainable with more investments as the system grows rapidly across the country’s remotest corners.
Card game
NPCI also manages the domestic card network Rupay, which competes with Visa and Mastercard in the credit card segment. Rupay credit cards can be linked to UPI, which has been driving its adoption.
In debit cards, Rupay has over 80 percent market share. However, most of the debit card transactions beyond ATM withdrawals have moved to UPI over the last five-six years.
UPI is on the cusp of surpassing global payments giant Visa’s daily transaction volume, which will make it the largest retail interbank payment settlement platform in the world.
UPI facilitates somewhere between 600-650 million transactions a day. The platform recorded over 18 billion transactions in May worth over Rs 25 lakh crore.
NPCI also has two subsidiaries, NIPL (NPCI International Payments Limited) and NBBL (NPCI Bharat Billpay Limited). NBBL aggregates all the utility bill payments online, connecting all the billers and customers on third-party payment apps. NIPL works to expand the reach of NPCI internationally through commercial arrangements with foreign financial institutions.
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