Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of India's National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), outlines how AI will drive the next phase of UPI growth — targeting a billion daily transactions. Key areas include reaching new users via voice and multilingual interfaces, fraud detection, mule identification, and credit distribution using digital footprints. Asbe also sees an opportunity for Indian banks and fintechs to build small, domain-specific language models trained on India's rich payments data. NPCI's FIMI model, launched last year for dispute resolution, is already serving over a million users. On competition, Asbe acknowledges PhonePe and Google Pay hold over 80% market share and argues that viable commercial models for UPI apps are the key to attracting new entrants. A 30% market share cap is set to take effect December 31, 2026.
