UPI Topples Visa In Just Nine Years!
By Anushka Singh
In a world where financial giants like Visa and Mastercard have long held sway, a quiet revolution brewed in the heart of India. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a brainchild of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has not only disrupted the global payments landscape but has now surpassed Visa in daily transaction volume—a feat achieved in a mere nine years since its launch in 2016. With 644 million transactions on June 1, 2025, and 650 million the next day, UPI has outpaced Visa’s global daily average of 639 million, cementing its place as the world’s largest retail interbank payment settlement platform. This is no ordinary milestone; it’s a testament to India’s audacious leap from a cash-heavy economy to a digital juggernaut, driven by the visionary zeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital Bharat initiative.
Nine years ago, the idea of a digital payment system overtaking a global titan like Visa seemed fanciful. India, in 2016, was a nation tethered to cash, with millions standing in serpentine queues at ATMs and banks. The demonetisation announcement on November 8, 2016, by PM Modi, which withdrew ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes, jolted the nation out of its cash comfort zone. Critics called it disruptive, even chaotic, but it was a calculated push toward a cashless future. UPI, launched just months earlier on April 11, 2016, by then-RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, became the fulcrum of this transformation.
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From a modest 93,000 transactions worth ₹3 crore in August 2016, UPI’s growth has been nothing short of exponential. By March 2019, it clocked 800 million transactions valued at ₹1.3 lakh crore. Fast forward to May 2025, and UPI processed a staggering 18.68 billion transactions worth ₹25.14 lakh crore (approximately $294.21 billion), dwarfing the total value of card transactions in India by 12 times. This meteoric rise, fueled by a 40 per cent year-on-year growth and a 5–7 per cent monthly increase, has seen UPI account for nearly 85 per cent of India’s digital payments and 48.5 per cent of global real-time payment transactions.
At the heart of this financial revolution lies PM Modi’s Digital India initiative, launched on July 1, 2015, with the ambitious goal of transforming India into a digitally empowered society. Modi’s vision was clear: technology should bridge divides, not widen them. “While decades were spent thinking that the use of technology would deepen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, we changed this mindset and used technology to eliminate the gap,” he declared in a LinkedIn post marking a decade of Digital India. Today, with over 97 crore internet connections—up from 25 crore in 2014—India’s digital infrastructure has become the backbone of UPI’s success.
Modi’s leadership has been pivotal in fostering an ecosystem where innovation thrives. The India Stack, a robust digital public infrastructure, integrates platforms like Aadhaar, mobile connectivity, and UPI to enable seamless financial inclusion. UPI’s open, interoperable architecture, built on the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), allows users to transact across multiple third-party apps like PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm, which together command an 86 per cent market share. This interoperability, lauded by the International Monetary Fund, has driven user adoption by offering choice and convenience, unlike the closed-loop systems of global players like WeChat Pay or Alipay.
The government’s push for financial inclusion has been equally transformative. UPI Lite, launched in 2022, caters to low-value transactions in areas with poor internet connectivity, bringing rural India into the digital fold. Features like UPI 123PAY, enabling payments via feature phones, and conversational voice payments powered by BharatGPT have made transactions accessible to the masses, transcending linguistic and technological barriers. The result? Over 500 million active UPI users in India, with 350 million adopting it within eight years.
UPI’s ascent to surpass Visa is not just a numbers game; it’s a paradigm shift. Visa, a 55-year-old behemoth operating in over 200 countries, relies on a deferred settlement model, batching transactions for end-of-day processing. UPI, in contrast, settles payments in real time, involving three to four banks per transaction, making it a far more complex interbank system. Yet, in just nine years and with operations in only seven countries, UPI has achieved what seemed impossible, backed by the Modi government’s unwavering commitment to digital innovation.
In June 2025, UPI’s daily transaction volume hit 650 million, edging past Visa’s FY24 average of 639 million. This milestone, achieved with a 40 per cent annual growth rate compared to Visa’s 10 per cent, underscores UPI’s scalability and efficiency. Unlike Visa, which primarily handles credit transactions, UPI is largely a debit instrument, making its dominance even more remarkable. The Reserve Bank of India’s FY25 report notes that India now accounts for nearly half of the world’s real-time payment transactions, a feat driven by UPI’s unparalleled reach.
UPI’s success is not confined to India’s borders. The NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) has taken UPI to seven countries—France, UAE, Bhutan, Nepal, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and Singapore—with plans to expand to 20 nations by 2028–29, aligning with Modi’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision. In France, UPI payments debuted at the Eiffel Tower in February 2024, enabling Indian tourists to pay in rupees via QR codes. Partnerships with global players like Worldline and Lyra are set to expand UPI’s acceptance across Europe, while collaborations with Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand’s Prompt Pay are revolutionising cross-border payments.
The integration of RuPay credit cards and credit lines with UPI has further deepened its scope, with ₹10,000 crore in monthly credit transactions. Initiatives like UPI One World, launched in July 2024 for G20 travelers, and WhatsApp’s upcoming international payment capabilities signal UPI’s global aspirations. Cyprus is set to become the second European nation to adopt UPI in 2025, following Modi’s historic visit, positioning India as a digital payments leader in Europe and beyond.
UPI’s journey hasn’t been without hurdles. Early technical glitches and concerns over non-uniform interoperability posed challenges, but NPCI’s strict regulations and the RBI’s forward-thinking policies have addressed these issues. The NPCI’s 2021 cap on third-party app providers’ market share at 30 per cent aims to prevent market dominance and ensure competition, though it has sparked debates about stifling innovation.
Critics, including former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, once mocked UPI and Digital India, dismissing them as impractical. Yet, the numbers tell a different story: 131 billion transactions worth ₹200 trillion in FY24 alone. The COVID-19 pandemic, rather than derailing UPI, catalyzed its adoption, with merchant payments rising from 40 per cent in January 2022 to 62 per cent in May 2024.
What sets UPI apart is its inclusivity. From street vendors to high-end showrooms, UPI has democratised payments, empowering ordinary citizens. “These are not just Adanis and Ambanis; they are ordinary sellers,” said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, highlighting UPI’s reach in rural India. With 692 million active internet users and 750 million smartphone owners, UPI has woven itself into the fabric of daily life, from paying for a ₹10 chai to booking railway tickets via voice commands.
PM Modi’s assertion that “Digital India has become a people’s movement” rings true. UPI is not just a payment system; it’s a symbol of India’s technological prowess and its ability to leapfrog global giants. As Modi noted at the Global Fintech Fest 2024, “India is moving from digital governance to global digital leadership, from India-first to India-for-the-world.”
UPI’s triumph over Visa in daily transaction volume is a clarion call to the world: India is no longer just a participant in the global financial order; it’s reshaping it. In nine years, UPI has transformed a cash-dependent nation into a digital powerhouse, driven by Modi’s unrelenting push for innovation and inclusion. As UPI eyes 1 billion daily transactions by 2027, its journey from naught to global leader is not just inspirational—it’s a blueprint for the future of finance.
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