India is working to expand the global footprint of its homegrown digital payment system, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), to more countries, with a special focus on East Asia, Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju said on Tuesday.
UPI is currently accepted in eight countries — Bhutan, Singapore, Qatar, Mauritius, Nepal, the UAE, Sri Lanka and France — enabling Indian tourists to make digital payments for transactions abroad.
Speaking at the Global Inclusive Finance India Summit here, Nagaraju said UPI has played a significant role in driving digital payments across the country.
"Now we have expanded to some countries. We are trying to expand. To a large number of countries, especially we are focussing in East Asia now," he said.
The Department of Financial Services (DFS) secretary said India now accounts for about 50 per cent of digital transactions globally, largely due to the widespread adoption of UPI. He added that UPI transactions crossed more than 21 billion in December 2025.
Nagaraju attributed the success of UPI and digital transactions to the substantial growth in PM Jan Dhan Yojana accounts, along with a rise in the average balance maintained in these accounts.
The Unified Payments Interface is operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which facilitates real-time payments between individuals and merchants. NPCI is an initiative of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Banks' Association (IBA), and serves as an umbrella organisation for operating retail payments and settlement systems in the country.
Nagaraju also underlined the need to scale up small micro-units into medium enterprises, noting structural challenges in the sector.
"The graduation of micro-units into medium and large enterprises is actually not happening in the country, despite having a few crores of units in the country. I think that will happen only when the micro-enterprises get a lot of support, market access and also productivity gains, both through the technology as well as hardware," he said.
