MUMBAI — The next half-billion users of India’s Unified Payment Interface will likely never touch a smartphone keyboard to send money. That is the vision Dilip Asbe laid out last month. The managing director of the National Payments Corporation of India told TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week 2026 that artificial intelligence will drive that expansion.
UPI already handles over 750 million daily transactions. The target is a billion.
Asbe’s comments zero in on a hard problem. UPI’s explosive growth came from cheap smartphones and cheap data. That pulled in hundreds of millions of urban and semi-urban users.
The next wave lives in rural villages. Many have limited literacy.
Many have never used a banking app. Asbe said AI would be used “very effectively” to reach them. He also said AI would protect current users from fraud and help distribute credit.
The quote, given during the interview, ties three goals together under one tool. Fraud is the immediate threat. A network processing three-quarters of a billion transactions daily is a fat target.
Bad actors test it constantly. Asbe said NPCI must “use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud.” That is not a future concern.
It is a present operational necessity. The system needs to spot suspicious patterns faster than any rule-based engine can. AI models trained on transaction data can do that.
They can flag anomalies in real time. They can freeze a payment before the money moves.
Credit distribution is the longer play. UPI started as a peer-to-peer transfer system. It has grown into a platform for merchants, bill payments, and small loans.
Asbe sees AI underwriting those loans. An AI model could assess a user’s transaction history — how much they spend, where, how regularly — and approve micro-credit instantly. No paperwork.
No branch visit. That is how you lend to a farmer in a village with no bank branch.
That is how you lend to a street vendor who never filed taxes. The numbers give the stakes. UPI launched in 2016.
It took eight years to hit 750 million daily transactions. The next 250 million — to reach a billion — will not come from the same playbook.
Adding more merchants and more bank links still works, but the marginal gain shrinks. The hard users are the ones not yet on the network. AI is the lever NPCI plans to pull.
Asbe said the NPCI, India’s central bank, and the government are working together. That three-way coordination matters. The central bank sets rules on data privacy and fraud liability.
The government builds the digital infrastructure — Aadhaar, the biometric ID system, and India Stack, the open API layer. NPCI runs the rails.
AI sits on top of all of it. No timeline was given for the billion-transaction target. Asbe did not say which AI models NPCI would use or whether it would build its own or buy from vendors.
He did not name a pilot project or a launch date. The interview was a directional statement.
It said: this is where we are going. The details will come later. For now, the headline is simple.
India’s payments chief believes AI will unlock the next phase. UPI is already the backbone of retail payments in the country. Street vendors use it.
Big corporations use it. The next half-billion users are waiting.
AI is supposed to bring them in — and keep the ones already inside safe.
