Unified Payments Interface

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an Indian instant payment system and protocol 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 using only a unique UPI ID. 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). Major Indian banks started making their UPI-enabled apps available to customers in August 2016 and the system is today supported by almost all Indian banks.

As of 2025, 50% of world's digital transaction volume are conducted by India's UPI platform with over 250 billion annual transactions worth US$3.4 trillion. In 2021, UPI in India had over 500 million active users. In the month of August 2025, 20 billion UPI transactions worth ₹ 25 trillion (about 293 billion USD) were processed by the UPI system, processing an average of nearly 7,500 transactions every second. UPI is the largest real-time payment system in the world, it handles more than 640 million transactions every day, compared to Visa’s 639 million. Furthermore, the successful execution of an instant payment system at such an enormous scale has made it a soft power tool for India and is often cited as the most transformative and successful financial technology innovations India has developed. UPI accounts for 84% of digital payments in India.