UPI at 10: India's Payments Rail Posts 13,000-Fold Volume Surge Since FY17 as Global Export Ambitions Grow

The Quick Take

• UPI handled 24,162 crore transactions in FY2025-26, up from just 1.78 crore in FY2016-17 — a nearly 13,000-fold increase in transaction volume over ten years.
• Transaction value surged over 4,000-fold from Rs 0.07 lakh crore to Rs 314 lakh crore, making UPI one of the highest-volume real-time payment rails in the world.
• The tenth anniversary milestone accelerates India's push to export the UPI model globally through NPCI International, with live deployments in Singapore, UAE, and Europe.

India's Unified Payments Interface completed its tenth year of operations having processed 24,162 crore transactions worth approximately Rs 314 lakh crore (USD 375 billion) in FY2025-26, reported by CNBC TV18. The nearly 13,000-fold volume surge from 1.78 crore transactions in FY2016-17 marks one of the most rapid payment infrastructure scaling events in financial history. UPI's architecture — an open API layer enabling real-time bank-to-bank transfers via mobile devices — proved infinitely scalable as smartphone adoption accelerated and merchant acceptance expanded to tens of millions of points nationwide, including informal vendors and street markets previously outside the formal banking system.

UPI's tenth anniversary is as much a global story as a domestic one. The National Payments Corporation of India's international subsidiary, NPCI International, has been systematically deploying UPI acceptance capability in foreign markets — Indian tourists and diaspora in Singapore, UAE, France, and the UK can now pay using UPI at select merchants, with bilateral currency linkage allowing direct INR settlement. The scale demonstrated by UPI's domestic numbers serves as the proof of concept that NPCI International uses when pitching the UPI rails-as-a-service model to foreign governments and central banks seeking to modernise their own payment infrastructure. Several Southeast Asian and African central banks have engaged with NPCI International for technical cooperation.

The forward signal to watch is UPI's FY27 transaction volume trajectory — can it sustain meaningful growth from the 24,162 crore FY26 base? Saturation effects in domestic peer-to-peer payments may slow growth at the high end, but UPI's ongoing expansion into credit products (UPI-linked credit lines), investment purchases, insurance premiums, and cross-border use cases provides multiple new volume vectors. The macro variable is the government's stance on merchant discount rates: the current zero-MDR policy on UPI transactions has been the key commercial compromise enabling rapid adoption but limiting direct bank revenue from the system. Any policy revision to permit MDR above a transaction threshold would significantly change UPI's commercial economics for the banking sector.

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