India’s Payments Chief Says AI Will Power UPI’s Push Toward a Billion Daily Transactions

India’s digital payments network processed over 750 million UPI transactions daily as of mid-2026, and the man who runs the infrastructure behind it thinks artificial intelligence is the main path to the next 250 million.

Dilip Asbe, the managing director and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, said at Mumbai Tech Week 2026 that AI will drive the next phase of UPI’s growth across three areas: reaching new users, preventing fraud, and distributing credit. NPCI is the body that operates the Unified Payments Interface, which underpins most of India’s real-time digital payments.

What Asbe Is Actually Saying

Speaking to TechCrunch, Asbe laid out a specific vision. He said AI must be used to bring in the next wave of users, protect current ones from fraud and mule accounts, and extend credit to people and merchants who have built digital footprints but still lack access to formal financial products. He also called for voice and multilingual solutions to simplify onboarding — a priority in a country where hundreds of millions of people speak languages other than Hindi or English.

“We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules,” Asbe said. “AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints.”

He was candid that voice is still early. NPCI launched a voice assistant system in 2023 but adoption has been slow. The right use case, paired with more accurate models, could change that.

The Market Concentration Problem

Asbe also addressed UPI’s concentration problem openly. PhonePe, owned by Walmart, and Google Pay together hold more than 80% of UPI transaction volume. A cap that would limit any single app to 30% market share is set to take effect December 31, 2026, unless NPCI defers it again — as it has before.

Asbe’s view is that newer apps will grow their share once they find a viable commercial model. The existing giants spent hundreds of millions to build their positions. Without a clear way to make money inside the UPI ecosystem, competing with that spending is hard.

NPCI’s own app, BHIM, holds around 1% market share despite a reorganisation last year that turned it into a wholly owned subsidiary. Asbe said NPCI is not chasing a specific market share target for BHIM, but wants it to serve as a sovereign, secure alternative.

Small Language Models and Indian Finance

Asbe sees an opportunity for Indian companies — banks and fintechs — to build small language models trained on local financial data. His argument is that India’s payment ecosystem has a rich data set, and models tuned on that data will outperform general-purpose models on specific financial tasks.

NPCI has already run one experiment in this direction. Its model called FIMI, launched last year, handles user disputes — letting people cancel mandates and resolve payment issues. Asbe said it now serves over a million users and is scaling fast.

India is the world’s largest digital payments market by transaction volume. The 30% market share cap for UPI apps is scheduled to take effect December 31, 2026.