The Indian payments chief believes that artificial intelligence will be heavily involved in the next era of digital payments growth

The share of digital payments in India has increased over the years, with Unified Payment Interface (UPI) growing to over 750 million daily transactions. Aiming to reach over a billion daily transactions, Dilip Aspe, MD and CEO of National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, believes AI will be heavily involved in the next phase of user growth, fraud prevention, and credit distribution.

During an interview with TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) ​​2026 last month, Asbe said AI could drive the next half a billion 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 this includes all aspects, including reaching new users. We must use AI effectively to protect our existing citizens, find fraud, find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all users and merchants who have digital fingerprints,” he said. “We should use AI to look at voice and multilingual solutions to make the onboarding process easier.”

Many companies have spoken about the importance of voice as an interface in India to chat with businesses or systems. Aspe thinks it’s too early for that, as acoustic models need to be more accurate. NPCI launched Voice assistant-based interactive system in 2023. Adoption has yet to take off, and with the right use case, voice could become a critical component of the payment ecosystem, Aspe noted.

Artificial intelligence in finance and regulation

In the United States, startups and public companies are racing to add AI to finance. Coinbase and Robinhood now allow agents to trade on behalf of users, and OpenAI lets you upload personal account data to ChatGPT for financial advice. NPCI has shown some demos on it Proxy commerce and payments with Razorpay last year. However, there has not been wider deployment of some of these capabilities.

The NPCI CEO believes that with strong regulations and framework, India can also adopt AI-powered finance. He said there must be adequate protection for users and mitigation of risks – and if something goes wrong, the system must be able to see what instructions and consent the user has given to the agent.

Besides using models, Aspe believes the Indian financial system has an opportunity to build small language models.

“We think the models will stand out from each other based on the datasets available to them,” he said. “We have a very rich dataset in our ecosystem. I think there is a huge opportunity for Indian companies – banks, fintechs, ecosystem – to create small language models that are as sharp, specific and deterministic as possible.”

Last year, NPCI launched a model called FIMI to resolve user disputes. Asbe noted that it serves more than a million users to revoke authorizations and resolve issues, and is expanding rapidly.

UPI Contest

NPCI long time ago He sought healthy competition among UPI appsbut data indicates that Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay hold more than 80% of the market share. The regulatory body’s plan Determine the application’s market share at 30% It is scheduled to 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 pumped millions into their apps to reach their niche in the market. If new apps find viable business models within the fintech ecosystem, their share will rise, he said.

“I think there are several issues why we see this concentration risk present, and one of the big reasons is the availability of a viable business model. The moment we see the business model available to the ecosystem, I think new players will start investing very heavily,” Aspe said.

In 2024, the Propulsion Authority splits itself BHIM implemented UPI to make it more competitive and increase its usage. Although its transaction volume is growing, its overall market share is about 1%. Asbe said that with BHIM, there is no particular target market share that NPCI is eyeing. It wants to make it a sovereign and secure alternative to other applications, Aspy said.

India is one of the largest digital economies, and investors across the world will look to the regulatory landscape to invest money in newer fintech solutions and make the market more competitive.