Unified Payments Interface

Unified Payments Interface, commonly referred as UPI, is an Indian instant payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016. The interface facilitates inter-bank peer-to-peer (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions. It is used on mobile devices to instantly transfer funds between two bank accounts. The mobile number of the device is required to be registered with the bank. The UPI ID of the recipient can be used to transfer money. It runs as an open source application programming interface (API) on top of the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), and is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Indian Banks started making their UPI-enabled apps available on the Google Play on 25 August 2016.

It is one of the most widely used payment systems in the world, in terms of number of users and transactions. As of November 2022, the platform had over 300 million monthly active users in India. The proportion of UPI transactions in total volume of digital transactions grew from 23% in 2018–19 to 55% in 2020–21 with an average value of ₹1,849 per transaction. It enabled over 2,348 transactions every second in 2022.

In August 2023, there were several news reports and articles were published about the BFSI sector. Data from NPCI shows that 10.5 billion transactions were recorded on the platform in August, up from 9.9 billion in July 2023. As of August 2023, UPI has crossed 10 billion transactions. UPI also recorded ₹15.7 lakh crore in August, slightly higher than the ₹15.3 lakh crore record for July. In FY 2023, the value of annual transactions reached $1.7 trillion, out of which $380 billion is in merchant payments.