Dilip Asbe, the head of India’s National Payments Corporation (NPCI), believes artificial intelligence will drive the country’s next half-billion digital payment users. He’s not just talking about incremental improvements — he sees AI reshaping fraud detection, credit distribution, onboarding, and user interfaces.
India’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI) already processes over 750 million transactions a day. The target is a billion, and Asbe thinks AI is what gets it there. Speaking at Mumbai Tech Week 2026, he outlined a vision where AI helps identify fraud and money mule accounts, extends credit to users and merchants based on their digital footprints, and enables voice-based onboarding in multiple Indian languages.
NPCI already dipped its toes in this water. Back in 2023 it launched Hello UPI, a voice assistant for transactions. Adoption hasn’t taken off yet, but Asbe thinks that’s because voice models still need to improve. When they do, voice could become a critical piece of the puzzle in a country with dozens of languages and varying literacy levels.
India’s also building its own AI models for finance. NPCI launched FIMI last year — a language model purpose-built for payment disputes — and it’s already serving over a million users who use it to cancel mandates and resolve issues. Asbe sees a broader opportunity for Indian companies to build smaller, domain-specific language models trained on the country’s rich financial data.
On the competition front, PhonePe and Google Pay still control over 80% of the UPI market. A regulatory market-share cap of 30% is supposed to kick in at the end of the year unless regulators extend the deadline again. Asbe says new entrants will grow if they find viable business models, but acknowledges that the switching costs between UPI apps are razor-thin.
