MUMBAI, June 28 — India’s digital payments chief sees artificial intelligence as central to the next growth surge for the country’s Unified Payment Interface, which now handles over 750 million daily transactions. Dilip Asbe, managing director and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, told TechCrunch during an interview at Mumbai Tech Week 2026 last month that AI would be heavily involved in user growth, fraud prevention, and credit distribution. NPCI oversees the UPI network.
The numbers are concrete. UPI has grown to over 750 million daily transactions, and the aim is to reach over a billion daily transactions.
Asbe said AI could drive the next half a billion users, with NPCI, India’s central bank, and the government working together. “AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users,” Asbe said during the interview. “We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to fi.” The statement points to a strategic shift.
For a payments network that already processes three-quarters of a billion transactions daily, the next leap requires more than just adding merchants or bank links. Asbe’s comments suggest the NPCI sees AI as the tool to solve two problems at once: onboarding new users and protecting existing ones from rising fraud.
India’s digital payment share has increased steadily over the years. UPI, launched by a consortium of banks, has become the backbone of retail payments in the country, used for everything from street-vendor purchases to large bill payments. The network’s growth has been fueled by cheap smartphones and cheap data, but the next half-billion users may be harder to reach — they are often in rural areas, less literate, or less familiar with digital interfaces.
Asbe’s remarks indicate that AI could help bridge that gap. Voice-based interfaces, vernacular language support, and automated customer service are all areas where machine learning could lower the barrier for new users. On the fraud side, AI models can analyze transaction patterns in real time, flagging suspicious activity faster than rule-based systems.
The timeline matters. Asbe made these comments at Mumbai Tech Week last month, and the interview was published by TechCrunch late on June 27.
The NPCI, India’s central bank, and the government are all coordinating on the push, Asbe said. For Central Asian markets watching India’s digital payment experiment, the implications are direct. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other regional economies are building their own instant-payment systems, often looking to India’s UPI as a template.
If AI becomes a core component of UPI’s next phase, that architecture could influence how payment networks are designed from Almaty to Tashkent. The question now is execution.
Asbe laid out the vision: AI driving the next half-billion users, protecting current citizens, and finding fraud. The details of how that works — which AI models, what data sets, what regulatory guardrails — remain to be seen. But the direction is set.
India’s payments chief thinks the next era of digital payment growth will be heavily AI-driven, and the network’s daily transaction count of over 750 million gives him a platform to test that thesis at scale.
