Digital dominance: UPI tops global real-time payments with 49% share; govt tells Lok Sabha
Citing an International Monetary Fund (IMF) report titled ‘Growing Retail Digital Payments (The Value of Interoperability)’ dated June 2025, the government said UPI has emerged as the largest fast-payment system worldwide.
An ACI Worldwide report, ‘Prime Time for Real-Time’ 2024, further shows that UPI accounts for about 49 per cent of global real-time payment system transaction volumes.
The information was shared by Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha.
According to the data placed in the Lok Sabha, India recorded 129.3 billion real-time transactions, ahead of Brazil at 37.4 billion (14 per cent share), Thailand at 20.4 billion (8 per cent), China at 17.2 billion (6 per cent), and South Korea at 9.1 billion (3 per cent).
Other countries together accounted for 52.8 billion transactions, or 20 per cent of the global total.The government said a series of targeted measures by the Centre, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) have helped accelerate digital payments adoption, particularly among small merchants.
These include an incentive scheme for low-value BHIM-UPI transactions and the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF), which supports deployment of digital payment infrastructure such as POS terminals and QR codes in tier-3 to tier-6 centres.As of October 31, 2025, around 5.45 crore digital touch points had been deployed in smaller centres under the PIDF, the House was informed.
In addition, a total of 56.86 crore QR codes had been deployed to about 6.5 crore merchants as of FY 2024-25.The government said efforts are also underway to deepen the use of RuPay and UPI across public services, transport systems and e-commerce platforms nationwide, to further expand the digital payments ecosystem.
