FIVE YEARS AGO, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a lesser-known organisation pioneering financial infrastructure in the country, held an offsite meeting for senior management under Dilip Asbe, the newly appointed MD & CEO.
The mood was one of optimism, as NPCI was celebrating the success of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in achieving 1 billion transactions per month. UPI, introduced in April 2016, facilitates swift, 24/7 money transfers between bank accounts in India via a QR code. Not content with that milestone, Asbe—an engineer by training who has had stints with BSE, global money transfer giant Western Union, and payments player Euronet Asia Pacific—surprised everyone by announcing a target of processing 1 billion transactions a day within five years.
At that time, NPCI was handling approximately 25 million transactions a day, a considerable 37 times lesser than Asbe’s ambitious goal. Fast forward to today, and though the target hasn’t been met, UPI transactions are breaking records, registering a remarkable 393 million transactions each day, just three times shy of the initial target. Enter the disruptors: The pandemic, which accelerated digital payments; non-bank giants like GPay and PhonePe pushing boundaries with cashbacks; and distributing ubiquitous QR codes to small merchants, from chaiwallahs to vegetable vendors. New use cases, which Asbe was banking on, also emerged, ranging from paying utility bills and investing in the stock market to global remittances and beyond.
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