Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath has referred to as for India’s UPI to be handled not simply as a home success however as an exportable power of sentimental energy—drawing a daring parallel between international oil politics and the way forward for digital funds.
“If oil formed geopolitics, can funds protocols do it too?” Kamath requested on LinkedIn. “An India-made commonplace different international locations plug into is gentle energy by design. Ought to UPI be an export, not only a success?”
Unified Funds Interface (UPI) has already rewritten the digital cost playbook. In simply 9 years, it has turn out to be the world’s largest real-time cost system, overtaking Visa and Mastercard in day by day volumes. UPI processes 650 million transactions a day, greater than Visa’s 640 million and Mastercard’s 450 million.
UPI now accounts for 83% of India’s retail digital transactions and processes 12 instances the worth of all card funds mixed.
Submit-pandemic, UPI’s transaction quantity surged 14x and its worth jumped 9x. From simply ₹2.62 lakh crore in June 2020, UPI hit ₹24.04 lakh crore in June 2025.
The system’s ecosystem has scaled quickly, with 491 million customers, 65 million retailers, 675 banks, and 80 taking part apps. India now handles extra real-time funds than the subsequent 10 international locations mixed, with 129.3 billion transactions in 2023 alone—half of all international real-time funds.
Kamath’s put up factors to a rising argument: UPI has outperformed legacy methods in each innovation and adoption, and will function a digital coverage instrument for India overseas. Already accepted in international locations like Singapore, UAE, Mauritius, and France, UPI is being acknowledged as a world benchmark, with the IMF calling it the “commonplace” for contemporary cost methods.
With options like UPI Lite, offline funds, voice-enabled transactions, and AI-powered fraud detection, India’s digital stack is now not taking part in catch-up—it’s main.
