UPI Transactions Have 84% Share In Retail Payments
FinTech BizNews Service
Mumbai, May 29, 2025: The Reserve Bank continued with its initiatives during 2024-25 to enhance the efficiency, security, and accessibility of payment systems, fostering a more inclusive and resilient digital payments ecosystem, according to the Reserve Bank of India's Annual Report for 2024-25 released today.
Efforts towards accelerating global outreach of India’s domestic payment systems, particularly Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and RuPay cards, were sustained. The Reserve Bank seeks to leverage the latest technology to provide the best-in class information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure.
Payments Vision Documents
Building on the foundations of the Payments Vision documents, the Reserve Bank focused on expanding digital payment adoption across all segments of society by promoting innovation and a supportive regulatory framework. The year witnessed greater emphasis on cyber resilience and payment security controls of payment system operators (PSOs), fraud prevention and consumer awareness to ensure a safe and seamless experience for users. On the global front, the Reserve Bank explored various avenues for expanding the global outreach of UPI and RuPay cards.
The Department of Information Technology (DIT) made significant advancements during the year in leveraging technology to enhance its operations, including the launch of PRAVAAH2 - a centralised web-based portal for submission of applications to the Reserve Bank for seeking authorisation, licenses or regulatory approvals. Several initiatives were taken in the areas of expanding cloud infrastructure for the financial sector and strengthening cyber security.
Payment Systems Growth
During the year, DEPARTMENT OF PAYMENT AND SETTLEMENT SYSTEMS (DPSS) launched many initiatives in line with Payments Vision 2025, across the pillars of integrity, inclusion, innovation, institutionalisation and internationalisation.
India’s payment and settlement systems recorded a robust growth of 34.8 per cent in terms of transaction volume during 2024-25 on top of the expansion of 44 per cent in the previous year. In value terms, the growth was 17.3 per cent in 2024-25 as compared with 15.8 per cent in the previous year, mainly due to growth in the large value payment system, viz., Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS). The share of digital transactions in the total volume of non-cash retail payments was 99.9 per cent during 2024-25 (99.8 per cent a year ago).
India recorded 48.5% of real time global payments by volume in the last FY, primarily driven by the UPI.
Digital Payments
During 2024-25, RTGS transactions increased by 12 per cent in volume terms and 17.8 per cent in value terms. The volume and value of retail transactions increased by 34.9 per cent and 16.1 per cent, respectively. As on March 31, 2025, RTGS services were available through 1,73,688 IFSCs4 of 250 member banks, while NEFT services were available through 1,74,762 IFSCs of 236 member banks.
The retail payment system recorded robust growth in transaction volume as well as value in 2024-25.
Amongst the retail payment system, UPI transactions increased by 41.7 per cent in terms of volume and 30.3 per cent in terms of value, while NEFT transactions rose by 32.4 per cent in terms of volume and 13.4 per cent in terms of value. In terms of volume, UPI transactions had the highest share (84 per cent) in total retail payments during 2024-25.
Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) aided the growth in digital payments during the year by subsidising the availability of acceptance infrastructure, especially in Tier III to Tier VI centres. During 2024-25, the number of point of sale (PoS) terminals increased by 24.7 per cent to 1.1 crore. UPI Quick Response (QR) codes increased by 91.5 per cent to 65.8 crore as on March 31, 2025.
Authorisation of Payment Systems
During the year, the Reserve Bank accorded authorisation/approval to 26 online Payment Aggregators (PAs), five Payment Aggregators - Cross Border (PA-CB), 11 non bank Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI) issuers, one Trade Receivables and Discounting System (TReDS) entity and one white label ATM (WLA) operator, besides granting in-principle
authorisation to a few other online PAs, PPIs and WLA operators. Moreover, the Reserve Bank also granted approval to four banks for PPI issuance during the year.
The Central Payments Fraud Information Registry (CPFIR), a web-based payment related fraud reporting solution, has now been extended to 49 scheduled UCBs, all local area banks, 43 RRBs, 71 district central co-operative banks (DCCBs) and 234 non-scheduled UCBs. The remaining banks are being on-boarded to CPFIR reporting in a gradual manner.
Taking UPI To 20 Countries
The Reserve Bank is committed towards the goal of taking UPI to 20 countries with a completion timeline of 2028-29 and has been facilitating the global outreach of expanding the footprint of UPI as well as the RuPay cards. The Reserve Bank has joined Project Nexus and is actively collaborating with other countries on interlinking of FPS.
DEPARTMENT OF TECHNOLOGY (DIT)
DIT continued its endeavour to ensure the smooth functioning of all the IT systems and applications of the Reserve Bank and leverage the latest technology to provide the best-in-class ICT infrastructure. PRAVAAH, the secure and centralised web-based portal, was made live during the year.
The Reserve Bank had issued ‘Payments Vision 2025’ in June 2022 detailing the roadmap it wishes to embark on for the period up to December 2025.
Greenfield data centre
Construction activity of the second greenfield data centre is progressing well. The facility has been designed and built to ensure a high level of redundancy, resilience and system availability, incorporating in-built fault tolerance. It has achieved Tier IV certification for its design, underscoring its compliance with the highest standards of reliability and performance.
The work on Phase I of the IFS cloud services was initiated during the year. Simultaneously, work on beta phase of the IFS cloud, involving a few banks/financial intermediaries having Minimum Viable Product (MVP) services, has commenced to obtain customer feedback, understand the challenges, and help improve the cloud services offering.
INFINET 3.0 project
The Reserve Bank had initiated INFINET 3.0 project through IFTAS with the objective of refreshing the existing INFINET 2.0 with transformative changes in technology, framework, automation, improved bandwidth, and overall services. The latest SD-WAN technology has been adopted in the INFINET 3.0 solution design which allows for better traffic engineering, application visibility and enhanced security. Presently, the project is at an advanced stage of implementation. To enable cross-border payments in local currencies, the Reserve Bank has completed the development of Global SFMS Hub during the year. Using the services of this Hub, interested countries through their central bank or designated bank may directly send/receive financial messages to/from the designated bank in India. Technical discussions with countries that have expressed interest in connecting with the Hub are presently underway.
The e-Kuber 3.0 application is being developed with many business and functional modules along with an enterprise application technical platform. The development of e-Payments and e-Receipts as part of GPx was completed during the year, and the implementation of the core accounting platform is underway.
