'If oil shaped geopolitics, India’s UPI can...': Nikhil Kamath just dropped a bold take

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath has called for India's UPI to be treated not just as a domestic success but as an exportable force of soft power—drawing a bold parallel between global oil politics and the future of digital payments.

“If oil shaped geopolitics, can payments protocols do it too?” Kamath asked on LinkedIn. “An India-made standard other countries plug into is soft power by design. Should UPI be an export, not just a success?”

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has already rewritten the digital payment playbook. In just nine years, it has become the world’s largest real-time payment system, overtaking Visa and Mastercard in daily volumes. UPI processes 650 million transactions a day, more than Visa’s 640 million and Mastercard’s 450 million.

UPI now accounts for 83% of India’s retail digital transactions and processes 12 times the value of all card payments combined.

Post-pandemic, UPI’s transaction volume surged 14x and its value jumped 9x. From just ₹2.62 lakh crore in June 2020, UPI hit ₹24.04 lakh crore in June 2025.

The system's ecosystem has scaled rapidly, with 491 million users, 65 million merchants, 675 banks, and 80 participating apps. India now handles more real-time payments than the next 10 countries combined, with 129.3 billion transactions in 2023 alone—half of all global real-time payments.

Kamath’s post points to a growing argument: UPI has outperformed legacy systems in both innovation and adoption, and could serve as a digital policy tool for India abroad. Already accepted in countries like Singapore, UAE, Mauritius, and France, UPI is being recognized as a global benchmark, with the IMF calling it the “standard” for modern payment systems.

With features like UPI Lite, offline payments, voice-enabled transactions, and AI-powered fraud detection, India’s digital stack is no longer playing catch-up—it’s leading.