India has emerged as the global leader in fast payments, according to a note by the International Monetary Fund, “Growing Retail Digital Payments: The Value of Interoperability. At the heart of this transformation is the Unified Payments Interface, better known as UPI.
India’s Unified Payments Interface is also now the world’s number one real-time payment system. It has surpassed Visa to take the lead in processing daily transactions, according to a backgrounder by the Indian government. UPI handles more than 640 million transactions every day, compared to Visa’s 639 million. This scale is extraordinary, especially when you consider that UPI achieved it in just nine years, the note states.
UPI now accounts for almost 50% of transactions globally, given it is an open and interoperable system built for speed and simplicity.