The IMF’s recognition of the UPI or the Unified Payments Interface as the world’s largest real-time payment system with 129.3 billion transactions has created a buzz across corporate circles and corporate India. Underscoring its rapid growth and global dominance key online payment platforms have hailed the recognition and highlighted the strong collaboration of the regulator and the banking system.
With this India is far ahead of countries such as Brazil, Thailand, China and South Korea. Here is a quick look at how key online payment platforms view the move-
UPI’s global leadership driven by interoperability and innovation: PayNearby CEO
“The IMF’s recognition of UPI as the world’s largest retail fast-payment system, with nearly half of global real-time payment transactions, reflects the scale and interoperability that India’s digital payments infrastructure has steadily achieved. This progress has been enabled by strong institutional collaboration between the Government, RBI, and NPCI, alongside continuous innovation across the ecosystem.” said Anand Kumar Bajaj, Founder, MD & CEO of PayNearby.
UPI becomes global benchmark for real-time payments: Cashfree CEO
Many believe that with this India has shown the world that financial innovation can be both deeply inclusive and globally scalable. “UPI is now the reference architecture for real-time payments, accounting for nearly half of all instant transactions worldwide. What’s most compelling is the depth of this growth: tier-2 and tier-3 adoption, ubiquitous QR rails, and a steady shift toward higher-value digital payments,” said Akash Sinha, CEO & Co-founder of Cashfree Payments
“With credit on UPI scaling and innovations like Reserve Pay and biometric authentication coming into play, we’re moving from simply digitising payments to redefining what payments can enable,” he noted.
Govt, RBI push UPI adoption among small merchants: Chaudhary
In a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha MoS Finance Pankaj Chaudhary highlighted key steps the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), along with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has taken to increase UPI usage, particularly for small-value payments and among small merchants.
To boost adoption, incentives for low-value BHIM-UPI transactions have been rolled out, while digital payment infrastructure is being expanded under the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) scheme.
As of October 31, the government has deployed 5.45 crore digital touchpoints under the PIDF scheme across smaller towns. In FY25 alone, 56.86 crore QR codes were deployed, covering nearly 6.5 crore merchants, signalling the deepening reach of UPI across India’s retail ecosystem.
The Ministry said these efforts aim to increase QR-code and point-of-sale (POS) penetration in tier-3 to tier-6 cities, where cash usage has traditionally been high. “These measures are helping deepen digital payments even in remote areas,” the release noted.