The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has set the goal of reaching one billion unique Unified Payments Interface (UPI) users by December 2029 in its National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (NSFI) 2025–30,
For context, NFSI 2025-30 is a five-year roadmap for expanding access, usage and quality of financial services across the country, that builds on the outcomes of the previous NSFI 2019–24. And notably, the RBI says that the latter NFSI cycle delivered delivered near-universal bank account access and broad expansion of physical and digital service infrastructure.Â
To explain, banking access had reached 99.9% of identified villages within a five-kilometre targeted radius by March 2024, supported primarily by the expansion of the Business Correspondent (BC) network. Furthermore, the number of village banking outlets increased to 1.59 million in March 2024, up from 597,000 in March 2019. Meanwhile, Basic Savings Bank Deposit Accounts stood at 705.9 million in March 2024, rising from 574.2 million in March 2019.
Elsewhere, digital payment adoption metrics also strengthened. The RBI’s Digital Payments Index rose to 445.50 by March 2024, as compared to 153.47 in March 2019, while the Financial Inclusion Index (FI Index) increased by 14.3 in the same time period.
Within the FI Index, the access sub-index rose by 11.8, usage sub-index by 16.8, and the quality sub-index by 13.2 between March 2019-24, highlighting that progress increasingly came from active use of financial services.
However, surveys conducted during the strategy review identified persistent challenges. These included uneven quality of last-mile services, inactive or non-dedicated BC outlets, limited product ranges at access points, digital adoption barriers linked to education and income levels, and unmet credit demand.
Consequently, NSFI 2025–30 shifts the policy focus from expanding reach to ensuring effective usage, aligning financial services with livelihoods, financial literacy initiatives, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and stronger consumer protection frameworks.
UPI And Expansion Of Digital Payments
At the centre of NSFI’s digital payments agenda lies the continued expansion of UPI. The financial strategy document reports that UPI processed more than 130 billion transactions in FY24. And as of June 2024, there were 424 million unique UPI users, a number the RBI wants to increase to 1 billion by the end of the decade.
One must not that UPI transactions far exceeded other retail payment systems in volume, although National Electronics Fund Transfer (NEFT) continued to dominate transaction value.
Notably, UPI, NEFT and Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) together drove the growth of digital transaction volumes and values across India between 2019 and 2024.
To explain, this expansion rests on India’s DPI stack, which integrates Aadhaar-based identity systems, payment rails such as UPI, the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS),…
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