UPI payment failures due to technical issues fall below 1%

Technical payment failures on the United Payments Interface (UPI) platform have become rare, dropping to 0.7% from over 8% in 2016, according to Dilip Asbe, managing director and CEO of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

"When we started UPI, the technical declines were in the range of 8-10% and over the period, there has been a lot of effort from the ecosystem, especially banks to scale up the infrastructure. Today, we have 0.7-0.8% technical declines," Asbe said at the State Bank of India Banking & Economics Conclave here on Tuesday.

He said NPCI is planning to transition low-ticket transactions on UPI to UPI Lite.


"The RBI has increased the limit on UPI Lite, hoping that it will drive transactions on UPI and will reduce the load on banking infra," Asbe said. "As time passes, low-ticket transactions must be migrated to UPI Lite, that is the strategy the overall ecosystem is looking at."

UPI reported 16.58 billion transactions in October, up 45% year on year. Settlements amounted to ₹23.5 lakh crore, up 34% year-on-year, NPCI data showed.

In the previous month, UPI had crossed the 15 billion transactions landmark for the first time. Average daily transactions went up to 535 million in October from 500 million in September.

Asbe said the corporation is building the UPI stack for five countries while discussions are going on with another 10 countries.

"For UPI, we have signed up two countries... The implementation is yet to start and may start in the next few weeks," he said. "For Namibia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Peru, the commercial agreements have been signed... There are many countries where cross-border transactions have been initiated. Different discussions are going on for remittances with certain countries."

Asbe also said RuPay offerings are being implemented in the UAE and Mauritius.