Dilip Asbe, managing director and chief executive of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) — the body that built and runs UPI — says artificial intelligence will sit at the center of the country's next leg of digital-payments growth. "AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users," he said, per TechCrunch.

What UPI is

UPI (Unified Payments Interface) is a government-designed system, launched in 2016, that lets any two Indian bank accounts move money instantly, free, around the clock, from a phone — using a simple ID like a bank-agnostic email address for money. It's run by NPCI, a not-for-profit, and it's the world's largest real-time payments network by volume. In May 2026 it processed 23.2 billion transactions worth about 29.9 trillion rupees (roughly $360 billion) — around 750 million payments a day. Asbe's stated goal is one billion a day, and he sees AI as the way to get there.

Where AI comes in

Asbe pointed to several fronts. Fraud prevention is the most pressing: at hundreds of millions of transfers a day, rules-based screening strains, and AI can spot suspicious behavior and mule accounts in real time. Voice and local-language onboarding matters because India's next wave of users — in villages, across more than 20 official languages — often can't read English or navigate app menus; AI voice interfaces let people pay by speaking. Credit is a third: a person's UPI history is a digital track record that AI models can read to extend small loans to people who lack the payslips and collateral a bank demands.

NPCI is going further into "agentic" AI — software that acts on your behalf — having demonstrated AI agents making UPI payments in a pilot with the startup Razorpay, though Asbe noted there hasn't yet been a wide rollout. The body has also built its own payments-specific AI model, FiMI, to power a multilingual help assistant for disputes and queries.

The competition problem

Asbe's growth ambitions sit on top of an awkward fact: UPI is dominated by two American-linked apps. PhonePe (majority-owned by Walmart's Flipkart) and Google Pay together hold more than 80% of UPI volume; NPCI's own BHIM app sits near 1%. To dilute that concentration, NPCI has long proposed capping any single app at 30% of UPI volume, a rule currently set to take effect at the end of 2026 — though, as TechCrunch notes, the deadline has been deferred before. The hitch is economics: UPI charges merchants nothing, which leaves little revenue to lure new competitors in.

A global template

India increasingly treats UPI as an export. The system is live in a growing list of countries — Singapore, the UAE, France, Nepal and others — and NPCI is part of Project Nexus, a Bank for International Settlements effort to link national instant-payment systems across borders. For policymakers elsewhere building "digital public infrastructure," India's experiment — a free, state-run payments rail now layering AI on top — is being studied closely as a model. Whether AI can responsibly scale fraud control, credit and voice payments to a billion daily transactions is the test that will decide how good a model it is.