MUMBAI: With as much as four-fifths of all digital transactions taking place through the UPI platform that has grown exponentially in the past decade, the Reserve Bank governor Shaktikanta Das and T Rabi Sankar, his deputy in charge of the payments department, on Wednesday met with all the major stakeholders in the payment ecosystem to discuss potential strategies and challenges to further expand its reach.
The major stakeholders in the payments systems include banks, the National Payments Corporation (NPCI), third-party application providers and technology service providers, the central bank said in a press release late this evening.
Apart from the governor and the deputy governor in charge of the department, the meeting was also attended by other senior officials of the monetary authority.
“There were wide-ranging discussions on various aspects to widen and deepen the adoption and usage of UPI. The stakeholders shared their valuable inputs and suggestions, covering the strategies for scaling up UPI infrastructure and expanding the products portfolio; challenges being encountered by the ecosystem and innovative solutions for addressing the same; and innovative ideas to integrate potential users into the digital payments ecosystem,” the statement said.
The various suggestions received will be examined and suitable action will be initiated in due course by the Reserve Bank, it added.
Last week, Das had said as much as 80% of all digital payments now take place through the UPI network, which has grown by a whopping 90-fold in the past 12 years, and the country today accounts for as much as 46% of the digital transactions globally.
The share of UPI in digital payments has reached close to 80 percent in 2023, the governor said on March 4, while speaking at the RBI headquarters here during the digital payments awareness week.
“Our flagship payment system UPI has become the most talked about fast payment system not only in our country but also across the world. It is the biggest contributor to the growth of digital payments now as the share of UPI in digital payments has reached close to 80 percent in 2023," Das had said.
At a macro level, the volume of UPI transactions increased from 43 crore in 2017 to 11,761 crore in 2023, Das said, adding as much as 6.65 crore UPI users were added between March 2023 and January 2024 alone.
"We have seen retail digital payments growing from 162 crore transactions in FY13 to over 14,726 crore transactions till February 2024 of FY24, which is around 90-fold increase over these past 12 years. As of end 2022, we account for nearly 46% of the world’s digital transactions,” the governor said.
