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New Delhi, May 1. The invention named UPI (Unified Payments Interface), which provides the facility of making instant payments from anywhere to anywhere, to the common people through mobile phones, has completed its 10 years in the market and within no time it has become the world’s largest platform in the field of app-based payments. It was launched on 11 April 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India. In a decade, it has become the backbone of the digital payments ecosystem in India. UPI has emerged as an important means of financial inclusion, proving wrong all the earlier dilemmas and apprehensions regarding the adoption of such a concept by the common people in a country like India.

According to the report of the Finance Ministry, only two crore transactions were done through UPI in 2016-17. In the year 2025-26, this number will exceed Rs 24,162 crore, i.e. almost 12,000 times more. Meanwhile, the value of transactions also increased rapidly from Rs 7 thousand crore in the financial year 2016-17 to about Rs 314 lakh crore in the financial year 2025-26. During this period, transactions in terms of value increased by more than 4,000 times. This simultaneous increase in both volume and value reflects the growing role of UPI in driving high-use retail payments.

The unprecedented scale, reliability and interoperability achieved by UPI has been recognized across the world, the Finance Ministry said in a release on Thursday. The International Monetary Fund has recognized it as the world’s largest real-time payments system by number of transactions, demonstrating India’s leadership in building a new digital public infrastructure that is widely used, accessible to all, and recognized by the International Monetary Fund. UPI is today integrated with many digital payment systems in Asia and Europe and is making travel more convenient for international travelers and businesses.