India's UPI proves public digital model can surpass private networks: Report

New Delhi, Feb 21 (IANS) India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the world’s largest real?time payments system, has proved that inclusion and scale can go together and that a "public, interoperable model can surpass private networks," a new report said.

The report from Interest.co.nz said it offers a template for developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to achieve rapid digital?payments growth without dependence on multinational corporations.

"It is no wonder that international organisations now cite India’s digital-payments architecture as a global benchmark," said the publication.

By moving money over 170 billion times per year across a billion people, instantly and cheaply, India proved that "the world’s digital financial highways could one day flow through the country," and signalled its arrival “as a global economic and high-tech superpower,” the report said.

"For a country that has lived through foreign-exchange shortages and external vulnerabilities in the past, this kind of sovereignty over payments infrastructure is strategically transformational," it said.

India treats digital payments as public infrastructure, not as a premium private service, which was evident in UPI's growth to 400 million ordinary users by 2024, up from 30 million in 2017, according to the report. "This is financial inclusion at a national scale, not a mere slogan," the report said.

Comparing UPI's scale to US's payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard, the report said that "a piece of Indian public infrastructure that operates at zero cost to consumers is already playing in the same league as the world’s private payment giants and growing faster than both."

Further comparing China's Alipay and WeChat Pay with UPI, it said unlike those systems, India’s network is an open and fully interoperable public platform that every bank and fintech can plug into.

The report cited Reserve Bank of India’s data saying UPI accounted for over 80 per cent of all digital payment volumes in India, and that digital payments themselves constitute nearly all the payment volume in the country.