--- title: "India's Payments Chief Sees AI Driving the Next Billion UPI Users" description: "Dilip Asbe, who runs the body behind India's UPI — the world's largest real-time payments network — says artificial intelligence will be central to the system's next phase: catching fraud, extending credit, and onboarding hundreds of millions of users through their own languages and voices." category: "Tech" category_url: https://boursel.com/category/tech author: "Marcus Feldman" published: 2026-06-28T06:44:20.000Z updated: 2026-06-28T06:44:20.000Z canonical: https://boursel.com/article/indias-payments-chief-sees-ai-driving-the-next-billion-upi-users tags: ["upi", "npci", "india", "digital-payments", "ai", "fintech"] --- # India's Payments Chief Sees AI Driving the Next Billion UPI Users Dilip Asbe, who runs the body behind India's UPI — the world's largest real-time payments network — says artificial intelligence will be central to the system's next phase: catching fraud, extending credit, and onboarding hundreds of millions of users through their own languages and voices. 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](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/27/indian-payments-chief-thinks-ai-will-be-heavily-involved-in-next-era-of-digital-payment-growth/). ## 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](https://www.aninews.in/news/business/upi-hits-new-high-in-may-2026-with-232-billion-transactions-worth-rs-299-trillion-npci-data-shows20260602155337/) (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](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/27/indian-payments-chief-thinks-ai-will-be-heavily-involved-in-next-era-of-digital-payment-growth/); 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. ## Sources - [Indian payments chief thinks AI will be heavily involved in next era of digital payment growth](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/27/indian-payments-chief-thinks-ai-will-be-heavily-involved-in-next-era-of-digital-payment-growth/) - [UPI hits new high in May 2026](https://www.aninews.in/news/business/upi-hits-new-high-in-may-2026-with-232-billion-transactions-worth-rs-299-trillion-npci-data-shows20260602155337/)