The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), run by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, keeps growing fast. NPCI says 55.49 crore users had signed up as of June 2026. That figure alone gives a sense of how far the platform has come since its early years, when digital payments in India were still seen as a convenience rather than the default way people moved money.
The platform also had a strong FY 2025–26: 24,161.69 crore transactions worth ₹314.23 lakh crore. That’s up from 18,586.60 crore transactions worth ₹260.56 lakh crore the year before, and it keeps a pattern going back to FY 2021–22, when the numbers were 4,595.61 crore transactions worth ₹84.16 lakh crore. In between, FY 2022–23 saw 8,371.44 crore transactions worth ₹139.15 lakh crore, and FY 2023–24 brought that up to 13,112.95 crore transactions worth ₹199.95 lakh crore.
Looking at these five years together, both the number of transactions and their total value have gone up every single year, without a dip. The volume has grown more than five times over, from roughly 4,596 crore transactions to over 24,161 crore, while the value processed has climbed from about ₹84 lakh crore to over ₹314 lakh crore. Year-on-year, the jump from FY 2024–25 to FY 2025–26 alone added close to 5,575 crore transactions and nearly ₹54 lakh crore in value, which shows the pace hasn’t slowed even as the base has gotten much larger.
Tighter security rules
With that kind of scale, keeping the system safe becomes just as important as keeping it fast. The Government, the RBI, and NPCI have added several safeguards to address this. These include risk-based limits on transactions to cut down on fraud, protections against unauthorised mobile number changes, and defenses against misuse of SMS-based authentication, an area that has been a common entry point for scams. UPI apps themselves now have to meet stricter security standards before they’re allowed to operate.
NPCI has also introduced two dedicated frameworks: the Comprehensive UPI Information Security Framework (CUISF) 2025, and the Mobile Application Security Framework. Both require stronger cybersecurity controls across UPI platforms, covering everything from how apps are built to how they handle user data and authentication. The idea is to build these protections into the system itself rather than relying only on user awareness or after-the-fact fraud detection.
UPI goes global
Beyond India, UPI is also expanding through NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), a subsidiary NPCI set up in April 2020 specifically to take India’s payment systems abroad. Working with financial institutions overseas, NIPL lets Indian travellers and the diaspora pay across borders without the friction that usually comes with international transactions. At the same time, it helps partner countries build their own real-time payment systems modeled on UPI’s design, rather than starting from scratch.
Key Takeaway: UPI now works for person-to-merchant and person-to-person payments in ten countries: Bhutan, Singapore, the UAE, France, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Qatar, Greece, and Cambodia. Each of these partnerships reflects a slightly different stage of rollout, since some cover only one type of transaction while others support both.
The newest additions came in June 2026, with person-to-person payments going live in Nepal and person-to-merchant payments launching in Cambodia. Both mark fresh ground for UPI’s international footprint, and taken together with the domestic growth numbers, they point to a system that’s expanding on two fronts at once: more users and transactions at home, and a growing list of countries abroad.
MCQs:
1. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is operated by:
A. Reserve Bank of India (RBI)
B. Ministry of Finance
C. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)
D. Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)
2. UPI operates under which legislation?
A. Banking Regulation Act, 1949
B. Information Technology Act, 2000
C. Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007
D. Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934
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