Lot of headroom for digital payments platform UPI to grow: Google Pay V-P

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest, Kenghe said close to 400 million customers are transacting on UPI currently

Despite the massive growth since Covid-19 pandemic, there is still a lot of headroom for India’s flagship digital payments platform – Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – to grow and it has a titular role to play in enabling access to credit for a large number of people, said Ambarish Kenghe, vice-president, Google Pay on Wednesday.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest here, Kenghe said that close to 400 million customers are transacting on UPI currently. With India having about 1.4 billion people, and about 900 million bank accounts, there is a lot of space for UPI to grow.

Additionally, he highlighted that going forward, the volume of UPI transactions will start inching towards 100 billion transactions per month. According to the latest data, in the current financial year (FY25), UPI has recorded 55.66 billion transactions worth Rs 80.79 trillion.

In FY24, UPI surpassed 100 billion transactions for the first time, ending the year at 131 billion, compared to 84 billion in FY23. Over the past four years, UPI has seen a tenfold increase in volume, and is making up 80 per cent of all the digital payment volumes.

Kenghe said that going forward, we will see UPI enabling more credit, both credit on UPI as well as enabling access to money for people. Currently, credit on UPI is available through two offerings – ‘RuPay credit card on UPI’ and 'Credit Line on UPI’. Credit transactions on UPI are touching Rs 10,000 crore each month, of which approximately Rs 100-200 crore is from the "credit line on UPI" facility, while the remainder comes from the Rupay credit card on UPI facility.