India’s UPI has surged past a global payments giant.
India’s UPI now does more daily transactions than are processed through American giant VISA, former Niti Aayog Chairman Amitabh Kant has said. Kant shared a graphic which showed that UPI now does 650.26 million daily transactions, ahead of Visa which does 639 million transactions. UPI was launched less than a decade ago, while Visa had its beginnings in the 1950s.
“Phenomenal! This has been one of the most notable achievement of PM Narendra Modi government. This has transformed lives of citizens,” Kant said while sharing the numbers on X. “Achieving this in just 9 years highlights its unmatched scale and momentum. From India to the world, UPI is leading the digital payment revolution!” he added.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was a protocol developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016 to facilitate instant inter-bank transactions via mobile devices. It has become the de-facto means of payments in India, and powers bank-to-bank payments through apps like PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm. UPI has even gone internataional, and now has a presence in 7 countries including Bhutan, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, France and United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Visa, on the other hand, was founded all the way back in 1958 by Bank of America as the BankAmericard program. It evolved into Visa in 1976 and became a publicly traded company in 2008 in what was then US’s biggest IPO. Visa itself does not issue cards or extend credit — instead, it provides the payment network infrastructure and brand to financial institutions that issue Visa-branded cards and manage customer relationships and credit risk. Visa supporting over 11 billion cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets, with acceptance in more than 200 countries and territories.
Visa cards were widely accepted in India before the introduction of UPI. UPI has not only managed to take a large share of cash transactions, but it’s also eaten into the share of Visa and Mastercard. All the way back in 2018, UPI had beaten both Visa and Mastercard in India both in terms of transaction numbers and volumes. With with UPI now surpassing Visa in international payments as well, UPI is quickly cementing its place as one of India’s biggest success stories in the digital space.