MUMBAI — Dilip Asbe, the Managing Director and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, announced on May 1, 2026, that artificial intelligence (AI) will drive the next phase of Unified Payment Interface (UPI) expansion. The expansion will focus on user protection, fraud detection, credit access, and multilingual onboarding solutions.

"AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users. We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints," Asbe said. The National Payments Corporation of India oversees the UPI, which processes over 750 million daily transactions.

"We must use AI to look at the voice and multilingual solutions to make onboarding simpler," Asbe said. In 2023, the organization launched a voice assistant-based interactive system. Last year, it introduced a model called FIMI to resolve user disputes, which currently serves over one million users for canceling mandates and addressing issues.

"We believe that the models will differentiate from each other based on the data sets that are made available to them. We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem. I think there is a big opportunity for Indian companies — the banks, FinTechs, and the ecosystem — to create small language models which are sharp, specific, and as deterministic as possible," Asbe said.

PhonePe and Google Pay currently account for over 80% of the Unified Payment Interface market share. A regulation capping a single app's UPI market share at 30% is scheduled to become effective on December 31, 2026. The National Payments Corporation of India spun off its BHIM UPI app in 2024, which holds approximately 1% of the market share.

"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. The moment we see the commercial model being available to the ecosystem, I believe newer players will start investing very heavily," Asbe said.