AI for – India’s UPI is already handling over 750 million daily transactions, but Dilip Asbe, CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, is betting the next half-billion of users will come through AI—used for onboarding, fraud prevention, voice support, and eve
On a stage in Mumbai last month at Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) 2026, Dilip Asbe didn’t talk like someone satisfied with what Unified Payments Interface already delivers. He talked like someone watching the next growth curve approach—and insisting it won’t be reached with payments tech alone.
India’s digital payments have surged over the years, with UPI growing to over 750 million daily transactions. Asbe. the MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)—the body that oversees UPI—wants the system to push past one billion daily transactions. To get there. he believes AI will be deeply involved. not just for performance. but for how people are brought into the ecosystem and kept safe inside it.
“Asbe said AI could drive the next half a billion users with NPCI. India’s central bank. and the government working together. ” the remarks captured during his interview frame the core ambition. He argued that AI will be used “very effectively” in the next wave of UPI, including for “reaching new users.”.
In his view, that doesn’t separate growth from protection. AI, he said, must help protect current users, “find fraud, and to find mules.” He also said AI should be used to “provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints.”
And for onboarding—an area that matters most when scale accelerates—Asbe pushed voice and multilingual support as a practical path, but only if the technology is good enough.
“We must use AI to look at the voice and multilingual solutions to make onboarding simpler,” he said. He acknowledged that many companies have discussed voice as an interface for India, for talking to systems or companies. Still, he believes it’s early days because voice models need to be “more accurate.”.
NPCI has already tested voice-led payments. It launched a voice assistant-based interactive system in 2023. Asbe said adoption for that has “yet to take off.” With the right use case, though, he argued voice can become a “critical component” of the payment ecosystem.
That mix—AI for acquisition. AI for safety. AI for credit. AI for voice—sits inside a larger debate about what finance can allow itself to do. In the U.S., he pointed to startups and public companies rushing to add AI to finance. Coinbase and Robinhood allow agents to trade on users’ behalf. and OpenAI lets people load personal account data into ChatGPT to get financial advice.
NPCI has shown its own demos of agentic commerce and payments with Razorpay last year, but Asbe said there hasn’t been a wider rollout of some of these capabilities. His belief is that India can adopt AI-powered finance too—if there is “robust regulations and a framework.”
He said the system should provide enough protection for users and mitigation for risk. And if something goes wrong, it should be able to look at the instructions and consent given by the user to an agent.
Beyond the question of AI use, Asbe sees an opportunity to build AI that fits India’s data realities. He said the Indian finance ecosystem has a chance to create small language models.
“We believe that the models will differentiate from each other based on the data sets that are made available to them,” Asbe said. “We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem.”
He argued that banks. FinTechs. and the wider ecosystem can create small language models “which are sharp. specific. and as deterministic as possible.” That matters because. in a payments world where outcomes have consequences. “deterministic” behavior is the kind of promise the industry wants to chase.
NPCI has already built experience in this direction. Last year, it launched a model called FIMI to solve user disputes. Asbe said it is serving over a million users to cancel mandates and resolve issues, and that it is scaling fast.
Even as AI becomes the bet for growth, Asbe’s remarks kept circling back to competition—because competition is what sustains both innovation and pricing power when user bases expand.
NPCI has long sought healthy competition between UPI apps, but data suggests Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay have over 80% of the market share. The regulator’s plan to cap an app’s market share at 30% is set to take effect on December 31, 2026, unless it is deferred again.
In the conversation, Asbe said UPI apps have very low switching costs and that most core features are shared. He said PhonePe and Google have poured millions into their apps to reach their current market position. He also said that if new apps find viable business models within the fintech ecosystem, their share will rise.
“I believe that there are multiple issues why we see this concentration risk exist. and one of the important reasons is the availability of a viable commercial model. ” Asbe said. “The moment we see the commercial model being available to the ecosystem. I believe newer players will start investing very heavily.”.
NPCI has also tried to engineer competition directly. In 2024, the payments body spun off its BHIM UPI app to make it more competitive and grow usage. While its transaction volume has grown, Asbe said its overall market share is around 1%.
He said that with BHIM, NPCI is not targeting any particular market share. The goal is to make BHIM a “sovereign and secure alternative” to other apps.
In the background of all these statements sits a reality investors tend to read through quickly: India is one of the biggest digital economies. and global investors will be watching how regulation shapes competition and risk. As Asbe frames it, AI is one lever for the next billion transactions. But the other lever—whether users have room to move between apps—will depend on rules like the 30% cap and on whether new business models can take root fast enough to change today’s concentration.
The tension in his remarks is clear: AI can expand access and tighten security, but the ecosystem will only remain open if growth doesn’t harden into a handful of winners.
UPI NPCI Dilip Asbe artificial intelligence voice onboarding fraud prevention credit distribution FIMI BHIM UPI PhonePe Google Pay market share cap