New Delhi

Digital payments in India have recorded a 90-fold increase in the last 12 years, Reserve Bank of India governor Shaktikanta Das said on Monday.

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He said that India accounts for nearly 46 per cent of the world’s digital transactions, adding that this is reflected in the Reserve Bank's Digital Payment Index, which has seen a four-fold rise in the last five years.

"The retail digital payments in India growing from 1.62 billion transactions in 2012-13 to over 147.26 billion transactions in 2023-24. The flagship of our payment systems, the UPI, has become the most talked about fast payment system not only in India but across the world," Das said at the Digital Payments Awareness Week event in Mumbai.

Calling Unified Payments Interface (UPI) the biggest contributor to the growth of the digital payments ecosystem, Das said that the share of the homegrown payment platform in digital payments has reached close to 80 per cent in 2023.

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The central bank chief shared that the volume of UPI transactions has increased from 430 million in 2017 to 117.61 billion in 2023. He also noted that the time taken to reach the next 10 billion UPI transactions has progressively declined over the years.

It took 1,668 days for the first 10 billion Person-to-Merchant transactions, whereas the latest 10 billion milestone took just 45 days. Person-to-person transactions took 1,329 days to reach the first-ever 10 billion mark, while taking just 65 days for the latest 10 billion transactions.

Nevertheless, Das argued that there is significant scope for improvement in the digital payment ecosystem. 

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Through the “Har Payment Digital” Mission, he said, that the RBI is aiming to make every Indian adopt digital payments.

"Since the start of the mission in March 2023, 66.5 million new UPI users have been added up to January 31, 2024," the central bank governor said, while adding that the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund aided this growth.

This fund, created in January 2021 and extended up to December 2025, aims to increase the number of devices that accept digital payments in smaller cities and towns, strengthening India's digital payments system. 

As per a 2023 RBI notification, the fund seeks to add 3 million payment devices every year.

Das also acknowledged bottlenecks in the internet banking infrastructure, especially when it comes to interoperability between banks and payment aggregators, leading to delays in payments and settlements.

He said that the RBI's 'Payments Vision 2025' aims to make internet banking transactions quicker and efficient.

"We have approved the implementation of an interoperable system to NPCI Bharat BillPay. We expect it to be launched during the current calendar year (2024-25)," the former Tamil Nadu-cadre bureaucrat said.