As India marks a decade of the Unified Payments Interface, Kunal Shah, Founder of CRED, reflected on the platform’s exponential growth, calling its journey a “staggering run” that has transformed the country’s payments ecosystem.
CRED’s Kunal Shah took to LinkedIn and wrote:
“It’s 10 years to UPI today. What a staggering run this has been.
Approx 450M monthly users
Approx 250M daily users.
Approx 100M new autopay mandates setup
Approx 500M autopay debits a month.”
CRED founder Kunal Shah’s post highlights the sheer scale UPI has achieved over the past decade, with hundreds of millions of users transacting daily and autopay emerging as a significant use case, reflecting deeper integration into consumers’ financial habits.
Launched on April 11, 2016, by the National Payments Corporation of India as a pilot, UPI was designed to enable seamless, real-time bank-to-bank transfers. Its early growth was driven by platforms like PhonePe, introduced in August 2016, followed by the government-backed BHIM app launched by Narendra Modi in December 2016 to accelerate adoption.
Over the years, UPI has evolved into the backbone of India’s digital payments ecosystem, facilitating transactions across use cases—from small street vendors to large-scale retail businesses. While cash continues to coexist, UPI has significantly advanced financial inclusion and digital adoption across the country.
According to a report by Moneycontrol, UPI has scaled rapidly from processing transactions worth ₹21 lakh crore in FY20 to handling nearly ₹30 lakh crore in a single month recently, underlining its explosive growth trajectory.
As the platform enters its second decade, the focus is expected to shift towards expanding its user base to one billion people and enabling credit access for up to half a billion users, further strengthening its role in India’s digital economy.
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