The National Payments Corporation of India is in the process of rolling out a completely open source platform for the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform, said Nandan Nilekanil, co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys. Speaking at RedSeer's Ground Zero 4.0 conference on Friday, Nilekani said that with the upgrade, UPI will go to over a billion transactions per day. "Demonetisation led to an acceleration of demand for digital payments. UPI was launched in 2016. In October 2016, it did less than 100,000 transactions and today it does 2.3 billion transactions a month. Government action can less lead to acceleration of demand and that led to many payment companies being able to benefit from the rise in demand," Nilekani said. According to NPCI data, UPI recorded 2.23 billion transactions worth over ₹4.16 lakh crore in December 2020, up by 105% from the previous year. With the entrance of WhatsApp Pay and Bajaj Finance in the UPI space, the adoption and usage of UPI for daily and consumer payments is expected to grow manifold this year. A total of ₹33.87 lakh crore transactions were processed on the UPI in 2020. On the digital banking opportunity Nilekani said that India is still largely an under-banked country, though 80% of the population has access to bank accounts they do not have access to credit. "Now with the Account Aggregator model which is now coming through you can start giving them credit. You need companies that provide neo-banks, you need companies that provide APIs so…
