UPI at 10: new analysis shows Indian users transact at nearly double the rate of UK debit card holders
Set to mark its tenth anniversary on 11 April, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is on course to surpass 1 trillion lifetime transactions in early 2027. The milestone is expected to arrive by the end of the current fiscal year, which began on 1 April, with an additional 297.2 billion operations processed across the network. In value, cumulative totals are forecast to climb from 1.07 quadrillion rupees (approximately GBP 9tn) to nearly 1.44 quadrillion rupees (GBP 12tn) by then.
The projections are part of a new analysis by EBANX, a global technology company specialising in cross-border payment services for emerging markets, based on publicly available data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). According to NPCI, half a billion people use the Indian alternative payment method.
“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.”
Finding a way to digitise a cash-heavy economy was precisely the drive behind UPI’s creation in 2016. When the network completed its fifth year in 2020-21, the value processed in those 12 months exceeded, for the first time, the total physical notes and coins held by Indians outside the banking system, known as Currency with the Public, at roughly 1.5 times that amount.
Now, at its tenth anniversary, the gap is in a different league. According to the EBANX analysis, UPI moved 314.2tn rupees (GBP 2.5tn) in its most recent fiscal year against just 39.9tn rupees (GBP 323.5bn) in cash in circulation. Eight times as much. To put that in perspective, the value flowing through UPI in a single year now equals 88% of India’s GDP — up from 21% when the network turned five.
The scale of that habit becomes clearer next to another market. In 2025, UPI’s 500 million users averaged 457 transactions each. Britain’s debit card network, the most-used payment method in the United Kingdom, processed 27.3 billion transactions across 108.8 million cards the same year: 251 per card, according to UK Finance. UPI users pay at nearly twice that rate.
“What started as a push to reduce cash dependency redefined what money looks like in India and became the backbone of the country’s digital economy,” explained Satpute.
India’s e-commerce market is expected to reach USD 275bn by 2028 — nearly doubling its size in a five-year period. UPI already accounts for 57% of the total online purchase value in the country, followed by credit cards with 25%, according to Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI) figures featured in EBANX’s Beyond Borders 2026 report. Data from World Data Lab (WDL), also included in the study, rank India third globally in the share of digital purchases in total household spending, at 22%, behind only China and South Korea.
E-commerce success cases with UPI
Internal EBANX data captures this shift directly: UPI transactions processed through its platform, along with total payment volume, grew nearly fivefold in the last ten months. In the same period, the UPI conversion rate for EBANX merchants increased by 17 percentage points, reaching an average of 82%, more than 10 points above the 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,” noted Robert-Jan Lieben, VP of Commercial for EMEA at EBANX.
The merchants’ results back that up. A global SaaS company that integrated UPI AutoPay for recurring payments with EBANX saw total payment volume double within three quarters. Another company in the same industry had a 20% uplift in new subscribers when compared to card-only checkout. One of the biggest AI companies in the world added over 4,000 new customers per day in its first three months in market after enabling UPI AutoPay via EBANX.
The blueprint that travelled beyond borders
India has become a reference point for countries building their own real-time payment infrastructure. UPI’s architecture — interoperable across banks and fintechs, free to end users, open to third-party apps — is the model others have drawn from most directly.
“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.”
Launched in 2020, Pix has since overtaken credit cards as the most used payment method in Brazilian e-commerce and is expected to reach a 50% share by 2028, according to PCMI data in the EBANX Beyond Borders 2026 report. Used by 95% of the adult Brazilian population, the system drew directly from the Indian experience. Colombia is following the same path with Bre-B, launched last year.
Altogether, the Indian government has cooperation agreements with 23 countries for the exchange and adoption of its Digital Public Infrastructure platforms, with UPI already live in Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the UAE.
“UPI started as a solution for India, but NPCI’s ambitions are no longer just domestic. They are actively selling UPI infrastructure to other markets, rolling out cross-border P2P arrangements, and pushing into international merchant payments,” analysed Satpute.
“The numbers we are seeing across our merchant base are not a coincidence. 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,” explained Robert-Jan Lieben.