UPI

Fintech Brief — August 31, 2026 NPCI Readies UPI AutoPay Interoperability — Port Your Mandates Across Apps The National Payments Corporation of India is working on making UPI AutoPay interoperable, allowing users to port recurring payment mandates across different UPI apps and enabling merchants to switch payment service providers without losing existing subscribers. This is a meaningful consumer-rights move — currently, if you set up a Netflix or electricity bill AutoPay on Google Pay, you’re effectively locked in. Mandate portability breaks that tie-in. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — UPI’s Second Decade: The Free Ride Ends | Week of August 24–30, 2026 Executive Summary UPI turned ten on August 25. The numbers are deservedly celebrated — 24,162 crore annual transactions, ₹314 lakh crore in value, 49% of all real-time payments globally, 741 banks live, 11 countries connected. But this week’s coverage of the anniversary coincided with three developments that, taken together, reveal the platform’s most consequential inflection point since demonetisation drove its initial adoption. ...

Fintech Brief — August 30, 2026 UPI Completes a Decade: From 1.78 Crore to 24,162 Crore Annual Transactions The Unified Payments Interface marked its 10th anniversary on August 25, and the numbers tell the story of a platform that went from experimental rails to the world’s largest real-time payment system. Annual transaction volume surged from 1.78 crore in FY 2016-17 to over 24,162 crore in FY 2025-26 — a near 13,000-fold increase. Transaction value climbed from ₹0.07 lakh crore to approximately ₹314 lakh crore in the same period, a 4,000-fold leap. ...

The Transparency Theatre of 2026 Dispatch from Neo-Mumbai, Financial Year 2047. A digital archivist unearths the week of August 22–29, 2026, when India’s Parliament amended the payments law to allow UPI fees while promising they’d only apply to someone else, the RBI proposed the most detailed loan pricing framework in Indian banking history and lenders immediately vowed to find new ways to hide costs, a fintech unicorn launched paid advice at ₹25 per minute, and the nation collectively realised that every reform is just a reshuffling of the same deck. ...

Fintech Brief — August 25, 2026 UPI Completes a Decade: From 1.78 Crore to 24,162 Crore Annual Transactions The Unified Payments Interface, launched by NPCI on August 25, 2016, turns ten today — and the numbers are staggering. Annual transaction volume surged nearly 13,000-fold, from 1.78 crore in FY 2016-17 to 24,162 crore in FY 2025-26. Transaction value hit ₹314 lakh crore in the same period, while monthly volumes touched a record 2,366 crore in July 2026. ...

Fintech Brief — August 24, 2026 Razorpay Launches Vulcan — India’s First AI Foundation Model for Payments Razorpay has launched Vulcan, a transformer-based AI foundation model built specifically for payments processing — not an LLM, but a purpose-built architecture that treats each payment as an unordered set of fields, tokenising even missing values. Trained on roughly 3 trillion data points from 4 billion transactions and weighing about 3,000 signals per transaction, Vulcan collapses routing, fraud detection, risk scoring and checkout personalisation into a single model. Built with NVIDIA and AWS, the model is already in beta across 51,000 businesses. Early results: 8–10% better payment success rates, 8x more international card fraud blocked, and 5x more fraudulent transactions caught without additional false-positive alerts. The approach diverges from Nubank’s nuFormer and Revolut’s PRAGMA — both sequence models optimised for card-heavy markets — because India’s payment landscape (UPI, cards, netbanking, COD) needs a set-based approach rather than sequential ordering. Telangana Today ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — UPI’s Free Ride Ends | Week of August 17–23, 2026 Executive Summary India is about to end the most ambitious free-payment experiment in financial history. On August 10, Parliament passed the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, amending Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007. The amendment removes the statutory bar on charging fees for digital payments and empowers the UPI Steering Committee to implement a targeted Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) framework. ...

Fintech Brief — August 22, 2026 UPI MDR on Transactions Above ₹2,000 Could Begin Within Two Weeks The government is preparing to issue a gazette notification through the Department of Financial Services that will set the stage for a Merchant Discount Rate on UPI transactions above ₹2,000, with implementation potentially beginning within a fortnight. 1 Following the notification, an NPCI-led Services Steering Committee will determine the framework, scope, and rate structure for the levy. Consumers are expected to remain exempt — the charge will fall on merchants. A 2017 RBI rule that prohibits merchants from passing debit card MDR onto customers could serve as a template for consumer protection under the UPI MDR regime as well. 2 ...

Fintech Brief — August 21, 2026 UPI Transaction Fees Expected Within Two Weeks The government is preparing to announce a 0.3% Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on UPI transactions of ₹2,000 and above, with an official notification expected within two weeks. The move follows the passage of legislation earlier this month that laid the legal groundwork for ending India’s zero-MDR regime for merchant payments — while keeping peer-to-peer transactions free. Industry experts have pushed back, arguing that zero MDR for small merchants and low-value payments must be retained to protect UPI’s financial inclusion gains. UPI processed a record 23.66 billion transactions worth ₹29.88 lakh crore in July 2026, according to NPCI data, making it the backbone of India’s digital payments ecosystem. The challenge now: designing a tiered MDR structure that recovers infrastructure costs without pricing small merchants out of digital payments. ...

Fintech Brief — August 20, 2026 RBI Deputy Governor Lays Out Five Tests for Responsible AI in Banking RBI Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu delivered a keynote on August 19 — “A Vision for Responsible AI, Resilient Banking” — laying out five supervisory expectations for banks deploying AI: Include, Adapt, Understand, Safeguard, Explain. The core message: a machine may reach a decision, but a person must own it. Banks remain accountable even when models come from fintech partners or third-party vendors. Customers must be told when an automated system made a decision, given an understandable explanation, and have access to a human reviewer with authority to reverse it. ...