With over 175 million customers and 60 million merchants on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the platform is expected to process close to $425 billion (over ₹31 lakh crore) worth of transactions this year, which is equivalent to 15% of India's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), said Ritesh Shukla, chief executive officer, NPCI International Payments Ltd. "When we launched UPI in 2017 we processed $8 billion worth of commerce on the platform, which is less than 1% of India’s GDP," Shukla said while speaking on a panel discussion organised by Carnegie India. In August this year, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) set up a subsidiary, NPCI International, to export its flagship payments solutions UPI and RuPay cards. "We have started engaging with people overseas and the response has been very positive. We truly believe in the next couple of years we will be able to create something similar on the same lines of UPI globally," Shukla said. "We have achieved this performance in India due to the technology platform and the business use-cases. By combining the tech and business expertise, we are able to play in different markets where there are no fast payments system equivalent to UPI. We can go there, collaborate with governments and deliver digital public goods. There are countries where there are existing fast payments program, but it hasn't taken the shape and form that UPI has taken here. So we can also share knowledge and advisory services to the markets to bring traction, penetration…
