India’s share of digital payments has increased over the years, with the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) growing to over 750 million daily transactions. Aiming to reach over a billion daily transactions, Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, believes AI would be heavily involved in the next phase for user growth, fraud prevention and credit distribution.
During an interview with TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) 2026 last month, Asbe said AI could power the next 500 million users with the 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. We must use AI effectively to protect our existing citizens, find frauds and find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all users and merchants who have digital footprints,” he said. “We need to use AI to analyze voice and multilingual solutions to simplify onboarding.”
Many companies have talked about voice as an interface being important in India to chat with companies or systems. Asbe believes that it is early for that, since the voice models will have to be more precise. Launch of NPCI an interactive system based on voice assistant in 2023. Asbe noted that adoption of this has not yet taken off, and with the right use case, voice can become a critical component in the payments ecosystem.
AI in finance and regulations
In the US, startups and public companies are rushing to incorporate AI into finance. Coinbase and Robinhood now allow brokers to trade on behalf of users, and OpenAI lets you upload personal account data to ChatGPT for financial advice. NPCI has shown some demonstrations on Agent trade and payments with Razorpay last year.. However, there has not been a broader implementation of some of these capabilities.
NPCI CEO believes that with strong regulations and framework, India too can adopt AI-powered finance. He said there should be enough protection for users and risk mitigation and, in case something goes wrong, the system should be able to refer to the instructions and consent given by the user to an agent.
In addition to the use of models, Asbe believes that the Indian financial ecosystem has the opportunity to build small linguistic models.
“We think the models will differ from each other based on the data sets they have at their disposal,” he said. “We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem. I think there is a huge opportunity for Indian companies – banks, FinTechs and the ecosystem – to create small language models that are crisp, specific and as deterministic as possible.”
Last year, NPCI launched a model called FIMI to resolve user disputes. Asbe noted that it is serving more than a million users to cancel mandates and resolve issues, and is scaling rapidly.
UPI competition
NPCI has a long time sought healthy competition among UPI appsbut data suggests that Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay have more than 80% market share. The regulator’s plan for limit an app’s market share to 30% will take effect on December 31, 2026, unless the deadline is postponed again.
During the conversation, Asbe said that UPI apps have very low switching costs and most of the core features are shared. He noted that PhonePe and Google have invested millions in their apps to achieve their market position. He said that if new applications find viable business models within the fintech ecosystem, their participation will increase.
“I think there are multiple issues why we see that there is this concentration risk, and one of the important reasons is the availability of a viable business model. The moment we see the business model being available to the ecosystem, I think new players will start investing heavily,” Asbe said.
In 2024, the payments agency spun off its BHIM UPI app to make it more competitive and increase its usage. While its transaction volume has grown, its overall market share is around 1%. Asbe said that with BHIM, there is no particular target market share that NPCI is considering. But it wants to make it a sovereign and secure alternative to other applications, Asbe said.
India is one of the largest digital economies and investors across the world will be looking at the regulatory landscape to pour money into new fintech solutions and make the market more competitive.
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