'Digital India': IMF recognizes India's UPI as the world's largest payment system

India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been recognised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the world’s largest retail real-time payment system by transaction volume.

The IMF’s June 2025 report titled Growing Retail Digital Payments (The Value of Interoperability) noted that UPI has emerged as the biggest fast-payment system globally. ACI Worldwide’s Prime Time for Real-Time 2024 study further stated that UPI holds about 49 per cent of global real-time payment transaction volume.

India processed 129.3 billion real-time transactions, giving it a 49% global share. Brazil followed with 37.4 billion transactions and a 14% share. Thailand recorded 20.4 billion transactions at 8%. China processed 17.2 billion transactions at 6%, while South Korea logged 9.1 billion transactions at 3%.

All other countries together accounted for 52.8 billion transactions, contributing the remaining 20%. In total, 266.2 billion real-time transactions were processed worldwide.

The government informed Parliament that the rapid expansion of UPI is supported by coordinated initiatives from the Centre, the Reserve Bank of India and the National Payments Corporation of India. These measures include an incentive scheme to promote low-value BHIM-UPI payments and the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund which offers grants for setting up digital payment infrastructure such as point-of-sale terminals and QR codes in tier-3 to tier-6 centres.

As of October 31, 2025, around 5.45 crore digital touch points have been deployed in smaller cities and towns through the fund. By FY 2024-25, a total of 56.86 crore QR codes had been provided to roughly 6.5 crore merchants. The government added that efforts continue to widen the use of RuPay and UPI across public services, transport networks and e-commerce platforms to strengthen India’s digital payments ecosystem.

UPI also maintained strong momentum in November 2025. Data from NPCI showed that transaction volume crossed 19 billion, with value touching Rs 24.58 lakh crore as of November 28. This represented a rise of about 23% in volume and nearly 14% in value compared with November 2024.