India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) marked its tenth anniversary on 11 April 2026. Today, we want to share some numbers behind the milestone which are frankly speaking extraordinary. The world’s most widely used instant payment system now processes transactions at nearly twice the rate per user as UK debit cards and is on course to surpass 1 trillion lifetime transactions by early 2027.
UPI at 10: What the Numbers Show
New analysis by EBANX, a global payments platform specialising in emerging markets, reveals the scale of UPI’s transformation of India’s financial system:
- 500 million people use UPI, averaging 457 transactions each in 2025
- By comparison, the UK’s most-used payment method (debit cards) processed 251 transactions per cardacross 108.8 million cards (UK Finance, 2025)
- The value flowing through UPI in a single fiscal year now equals 88% of India’s GDP, up from just 21% five years ago
- UPI moved 314.2 trillion rupees (approximately £2.5 trillion) in its most recent fiscal year — against only 39.9 trillion rupees in physical cash in circulation, meaning UPI moves eight times more value than cash
- Cumulative lifetime transaction value is forecast to climb from 1.07 quadrillion rupees (~£9 trillion) to nearly 1.44 quadrillion rupees (~£12 trillion) by early 2027
From Cash-Reduction Tool to Economic Backbone
UPI launched in April 2016 with a single goal: reduce India’s deep dependence on cash. That mission succeeded faster than almost anyone anticipated.
By the end of UPI’s fifth year (2020–21), the value processed annually had already exceeded the total physical currency held outside India’s banking system. Now, eight years on, the gap is on an entirely different scale.
“UPI is the most widely used instant payment system in the world, and it achieved something that cards and e-wallets never could,” said Rashmi Satpute, Country Director of India at EBANX. “India was once a cash-based economy with few viable alternatives. UPI changed that by enabling anyone with a bank account to make instant payments, anytime, through the app of their choice on their phone. That combination had never existed before.”
Rashmi Satpute, Country Director for India at EBANX
UPI and Indian E-Commerce: 57% of All Online Purchase Value
India’s e-commerce market is projected to reach USD 275 billion by 2028 — nearly doubling in five years. UPI already drives that growth:
- 57% of all online purchase value in India flows through UPI
- Credit cards account for just 25%
- India ranks third globally in the share of digital purchases in total household spending (22%), behind only China and South Korea
Internal data from EBANX captures the momentum directly: UPI transactions processed through its platform grew nearly fivefold in ten months, while the UPI conversion rate for EBANX merchants rose 17 percentage points to an average of 82% — more than 10 points above the industry benchmark.
“UPI has become a key success factor for every global merchant entering India through EBANX. If it is not offered at checkout, they simply will not reach the majority of the market,” said Robert-Jan Lieben, VP of Commercial for EMEA at EBANX.
Specific merchant results from the EBANX platform illustrate the impact:
- A global SaaS company that integrated UPI AutoPay for recurring payments saw total payment volume double within three quarters
- Another SaaS company recorded a 20% uplift in new subscribers when moving from card-only checkout to UPI
- A major AI company added over 4,000 new customers per day in its first three months after enabling UPI AutoPay
The Blueprint Other Countries Are Copying
UPI’s architecture, interoperable across banks and fintechs, free to end users, open to third-party apps, has become an international reference model for real-time payment infrastructure.
Brazil launched Pix in 2020, drawing directly from the Indian experience. Pix has since overtaken credit cards as Brazil’s most-used payment method in e-commerce and is expected to reach a 50% share by 2028. It is now used by 95% of the adult Brazilian population.
Colombia followed last year with Bre-B. The Indian government currently holds cooperation agreements with 23 countries for the exchange and adoption of its Digital Public Infrastructure platforms, and UPI is already live in Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the UAE.
“India is constantly being approached by other countries that want to understand how UPI was built and how it scaled,” said Satpute. “Brazil was one of the first to do so, and today, five years later, it has Pix — the second most used instant payment system in the world, behind only UPI.”
NPCI, the body that operates UPI, is now actively marketing its infrastructure to other markets, rolling out cross-border person-to-person transfer arrangements, and pushing into international merchant payments.
Why This Matters for Global Businesses
The combination of a 500-million-user base, near-universal payment infrastructure, and an e-commerce market on track to double makes India one of the highest-priority international expansion targets for global companies.
“The numbers we are seeing across our merchant base are not a coincidence,” said Lieben. “India has built the infrastructure, the habits are there, and the market is still growing. It has everything a global company needs when looking to expand internationally and diversify its revenue base.”
EBANX analysis is based on publicly available data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), UK Finance, Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI), and World Data Lab (WDL). E-commerce forecasts referenced from the EBANX Beyond Borders 2026 report.
