UPI emerges as dominant force driving financial inclusion in India

New Delhi: Amid a surge in digital payments where nearly four out of five payments in the country were conducted on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in FY24, UPI has emerged as the dominant force driving financial inclusion, merchant adoption and cross-border transactions.

According to a new industry report, UPI now drives 84 per cent of all digital transactions in India.

The report by fintech consulting and advisory firm The Digital Fifth, UPI represents more than just a payment system — it’s an entire financial ecosystem shaping India’s digital-first economy.

“With UPI handling 16 billion transactions a month and projected to grow 3x by the end of 2030, the role of robust, high-resilience switching infrastructure becomes paramount,” according to Sameer Singh Jaini, Founder and CEO of The Digital Fifth.

Real-time fraud detection, cloud-native architecture, and scalable, dual-core switches are no longer optional; they are essential to ensuring frictionless, secure, and fail-proof digital payments as India continues its journey toward a truly cashless, globally connected economy, he mentioned.

UPI transactions surged 4 times from 2021 to 2024, reaching 172 billion transactions annually. It now dominates digital payments, far outpacing card-based and wallet transactions.

With 30 million+ merchants onboarded on UPI, the merchant-to-consumer (P2M) segment is growing at 67 per cent on-year, outpacing peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and signalling UPI’s transition into the primary retail payment system, the report mentioned.

According to the RBI, digital payments across India recorded a double-digit jump of 11.1 per cent year-on-year (YoY) as on September 2024.

According to the report, the share of the UPI in the country’s digital payments has surged from 34 per cent in 2019 to an impressive over 83 per cent in 2024, with a remarkable CAGR (cumulative average growth rate) of 74 per cent over the last five years.

At a macro level, the volume of UPI transactions increased from 375 crore in 2018 to 17,221 crore in 2024, whereas the total value of transactions surged from Rs 5.86 lakh crore in 2018 to Rs 246.83 lakh crore in 2024.

—IANS