‘UPI leads global real-time payments with over 2,400 cr monthly transactions’: Nirmala Sitharaman

India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become the world’s largest real-time payment system, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Sunday, with monthly transactions now crossing 2,400 crore. She said the platform handles nearly 80 crore transactions every day.

Addressing the inauguration of the Reserve Bank of India’s Greenfield Data Centre and Cybersecurity Training Institute in Khordha, Odisha, Sitharaman said UPI’s growth reflects the scale of India’s digital public infrastructure.

“UPI has become the world’s largest real-time payment system. Its annual transaction volume has grown around 13,000 times since 2016–17, and it now handles over 2,400 crore transactions in a single month, or nearly 80 crore transactions every day,” Sitharaman said.

The minister said the expansion of UPI has helped create a “vibrant fintech ecosystem” that is extending financial services to first-time users. “The vibrant fintech ecosystem built on these initiatives is bringing credit, insurance and investment opportunities to first-time users,” she said.

Scale of digital adoption

Sitharaman’s remarks come as UPI continues to dominate India’s retail digital payments landscape. According to the finance ministry, UPI accounted for 81% of retail digital payment transactions in FY 2024-25 and emerged as the world’s largest real-time retail payment system.

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The latest monthly figure is also supported by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data, which showed UPI processed 24.07 billion transactions in September — equivalent to more than 2,400 crore transactions.

The finance minister made the comments after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the RBI’s new data centre and cybersecurity training institute in Odisha. Sitharaman said the facility will strengthen domestic capacity for systems central to India’s payments infrastructure.

She said the campus will house mission-critical RBI systems, including RTGS and NEFT, while its training institute will develop expertise in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data centres.

Data centres as digital infrastructure

Calling data centres “the vault of the digital age,” Sitharaman said the government granted infrastructure status to the sector in 2022. She added that the Union Budget 2026-27 announced a tax holiday for foreign companies providing global cloud services from data centres located in India.

“With this campus, the Reserve Bank is adding to India’s domestic capacity for systems that are at the heart of our payments infrastructure,” she said.

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UPI’s rise has also expanded beyond India. Earlier, Sitharaman had said the payment system was operational across 11 countries, including France, Singapore, the UAE, Greece and Mauritius, enabling cross-border digital transactions.

The government has previously said India accounts for nearly half of global real-time digital transactions, underlining UPI’s position as a key pillar of the country’s digital economy.