Ten years of UPI: The infrastructure that quietly rewrote how India lives

In 2018, I moved back to Google to work on GPay. At the time, I could never have imagined that an instant real-time payment system developed in India by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) under the aegis of RBI with many notable individual contributions, would become so big and transform so much.

I remember trying to explain to colleagues abroad why a real-time, interoperable system built on a public utility model would work at a scale nothing else in the world had attempted. But ten years later, the undeniable proof is there for everyone to see.

UPI went far beyond a faster way to pay. It became the infrastructure underneath how more than a billion people's lives transformed, almost instantaneously.

The numbers alone tell part of that story: annual UPI transaction volume has gone from 1.78 crore in FY17 to over 24,162 crore in FY26, a nearly 13,000-fold increase, with transaction value rising from Rs 7,000 crore to around Rs 314 lakh crore in the same period, according to Ministry of Finance. In July 2026 alone, UPI recorded 2,366 crore transactions, the highest monthly volume in its decade-long journey.

Perhaps the clearest way to understand UPI’s social and economic impact is to remember the pandemic. India’s ability to navigate that period keeping households supported, small businesses functioning and everyday commerce moving, would have been materially harder without it.

As one of the world’s largest and most densely connected societies went into lockdown, the challenge was not only to contain a public health emergency but also to ensure that money could continue to move when people could not. At a time when people were sanitising groceries, parcels, door handles, and currency notes, handling cash had become another source of anxiety. This mattered especially for migrant workers who went back to their towns without any means to earn a living but many employers could support them through the ease of UPI payments. UPI made sure you didn't have to go anywhere. Groceries, medicines, a doctor's teleconsultation, rent, and even care packages, all of them got settled instantly.

What now feels ordinary was, at that moment, extraordinarily important. It made money fluid when people had to stay apart and helped preserve a measure of economic and social continuity in a year defined by uncertainty.

That same payment system has reshaped daily life well after the pandemic. Street vendors don't need cash and migrant workers send money home instantly. No more standing in queues and worrying about losing that hard earned daily wage. Now, the transformation has become invisible. We pay bills, split bills, pay school fees and even tip a delivery rider by just whipping out our phones and not thinking twice about what went behind it. It's not just the ease of use, but also the safety and dignity of those small daily decisions that used to carry real cost in more ways than one.

UPI now processes over 20 billion transactions a month, across 504 million users and 65 million merchants, accounting for 84% of India's digital retail payments and nearly half of all real-time payment volume globally, according to BCG/NPCI Global Benchmark Report.

No other country has built anything close to this at this speed. That scale has also meant deeper institutional reach: the number of banks live on UPI has grown from 44 in FY17 to 703 today, according to Ministry of Finance.

Not just spending, but that same shift has also happened when it comes to how India invests. The retail SIP transactions in India through UPI grew by almost 177% last year alone. Free and fast flow of money through UPI has been helpful for the growth of both mutual funds and broking transactions as everyone has easy access from their mobile phones. That's financial inclusion actually happening, not as policy language, but as habit.

And this gargantuan success is now transforming other countries. For the past many decades now, India was perceived as the biggest exporter of finished digital products, engineers and IT services. UPI has taken that story and levelled it up. India is now exporting the underlying infrastructure itself. UPI is already live in eight-plus countries, including the UAE, Singapore, France and the UK, according to Ministry of Finance.

We have signed digital public infrastructure cooperation agreements with 23 nations, with cross-border UPI volumes growing 20x in a single year, according to NPCI International/PIB data on UPI's global footprint and cross-border transaction growth, FY23–FY25.

When the CEO of PayPal, one of the pioneers of online transactions, said "everywhere I go, India comes up," he wasn't far from the truth. UPI is the first, and possibly the biggest, payment system integrated into the PayPal World. Countries aren't just admiring what India built, but going a step further and partnering with us to build it for them.

It's about more than just payments. This is a real, working demonstration that India can conceive, build, and scale deep technology infrastructure, not just service it for others, at a level the rest of the world now studies and adopts. It's a much-needed reminder that capability does not need to stay contained to a single sector. We are capable of applying the engineering discipline, design thinking, and scale-first approach that built UPI to achieving India’s ambitions for the future. These can be in AI or anything else.

The next decade will see UPI go beyond being just a payment rail. The most immediate shift is likely to be international. Imagine a global UPI that makes remittances and merchant payments across countries as instant and inexpensive as domestic ones.  

However, the strongest foundation for the next phase can be built on the domestic front. Credit on UPI is the frontier waiting to be unlocked. Contextual lending could genuinely change spending power for first-time borrowers. When commerce becomes more fluid, the economy becomes more productive.

Beyond that, there are three quieter shifts that are worth watching. The first, I expect, will be conversational, AI-led payments that let people transact in the language they already think in.

The next one that comes to mind is the extension of this power of payments to the offline world, to places the internet is yet to penetrate. And then comes the biggest change - programmable money that lets payments execute themselves when their conditions are met.  

Smart-contract-like rules could automate conditional payments, while machine-to-machine and IoT micro-payments are already allowing devices, vehicles and software agents to pay one another securely in real time. This is bound to get more sophisticated. Maybe your fridge will order and pay for your groceries. If built with the same principles of interoperability, trust and inclusion, these innovations will not merely add features to UPI, but will expand what financial infrastructure can do for India, and increasingly, the world.

Ten years in, UPI’s real achievement won’t be the volumes, staggering as they are. It will be that an entire generation of Indians now expect their financial lives to simply work—instantly, safely, and without friction. I suspect the next decade will be about proving that India can build that same expectation into everything else it touches.

(Ambarish Kenghe is the Group Chief Executive Officer at Angel One )