Dilip Asbe has a number in mind: one billion. UPI, India’s Unified Payments Interface, now handles more than 750 million transactions a day, and Asbe, managing director and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), wants it to go past that. He told an interview audience at Mumbai Tech Week 2026 that artificial intelligence will carry the load.
The aim is to bring the next 500 million users onto UPI. Asbe said NPCI, the Reserve Bank of India and the government are working on it together, with AI at the centre.
“AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users,” he said. “We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints.”
Onboarding came next. “We must use AI to look at the voice and multilingual solutions to make onboarding simpler,” Asbe said.
Voice is still early
He was frank about how far voice payments have come, which is not very far. The models need to be more accurate, he said. NPCI brought in a voice assistant-based interactive system in 2023, and take-up has stayed limited. Asbe thinks the technology could matter once the right use cases appear.
On the models themselves, he made a point about data. “We believe that the models will differentiate from each other based on the data sets that are made available to them,” he said. NPCI’s ecosystem holds a very rich data set, in his view, and Indian banks, fintechs and others have a chance to build small language models that are “sharp, specific, and as deterministic as possible”.
Disputes and competition
NPCI’s FIMI dispute resolution model, launched in 2024, now serves more than 1 million users. It helps them cancel mandates and sort out payment problems.
Asbe also took up the question of market share. PhonePe and Google Pay together hold over 80% of the market. Stronger commercial models, he said, would give new fintech players a reason to invest and compete. NPCI’s own BHIM app has around 1% market share, and Asbe said it is meant to stay a sovereign and secure alternative, not to chase a particular share.
