Engineering trust at population scale: How NPCI is building the future of real-time digital payments
When India speaks about digital public infrastructure, few systems illustrate scale, resilience, and trust as powerfully as the payments rails built by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). At the heart of this transformation sits UPI—processing over 20 billion transactions every month, valued at more than $280 billion—alongside IMPS and RuPay, forming one of the world’s most extensive real-time payment ecosystems.
For Vishal Anand Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer at NPCI, the challenge is no longer about proving scale. It is about engineering intelligence, resilience, and trust into systems that operate continuously for an entire nation.
“India’s real-time payments ecosystem operates at a scale that is unparalleled globally,” Kanvaty notes. “At this level, consistency, reliability, and user experience can only be sustained through deep analytics and continuous, data-driven visibility across the ecosystem.”
AI at the core of a national-scale experience
As transaction volumes grow exponentially, NPCI is embedding AI and advanced analytics into both operations and user-facing experiences. System behaviour—across volume surges, timing patterns, and participant performance—is continuously analysed to ensure that UPI’s promise of instant payments holds true at population scale.
AI is also beginning to shape how users and banks interact with the network. At the Global Fintech Festival 2025, NPCI introduced UPI HELP, an AI-based assistant powered by an in-house Small Language Model trained specifically on payments-domain data.
“UPI HELP is designed to streamline repetitive queries, improve accuracy in complaint resolution, and provide contextual guidance to users and banks, while maintaining strong privacy safeguards,” Kanvaty explains. “Multilingual expansion is a natural next step.”
Beyond experience, AI plays a critical role in safeguarding the ecosystem. Graph-based models and behavioural intelligence help detect fraud and mule networks in real time—identifying suspicious relationships across accounts, devices, and applications without disrupting legitimate users.
“The goal is early identification and targeted intervention, while preserving the seamless, instant experience that users expect from UPI,” says Kanvaty.
Open APIs powering a collaborative ecosystem
NPCI’s success has been closely tied to its commitment to open, interoperable architectures. UPI’s design allows banks, fintechs, and payment service providers to operate seamlessly across applications and accounts—an approach that has driven unprecedented adoption.
Today, UPI supports over 500 million unique users, 65 million merchants, 700 million QR codes, and accounts for 85% of India’s retail digital payments.
“Open standards are what enabled innovation at this scale,” says Kanvaty. “They reduce fragmentation, simplify integration, and allow regulated entities to innovate on top of a shared, trusted backbone.”
This philosophy extends across NPCI’s ecosystem, from net banking to bill payments, and increasingly beyond India’s borders. UPI-powered acceptance has expanded to Singapore, UAE, Qatar, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka, proving that common technical standards can scale securely across jurisdictions—while respecting local regulations.
Securing payments in an age of rising digital fraud
As digital payments expand, so do threats. NPCI has strengthened security by combining regulatory-aligned authentication frameworks with AI-driven intelligence.
UPI follows RBI-mandated two-factor authentication and has recently introduced on-device biometric authentication, enabling fingerprint or face unlock approvals verified cryptographically by issuing banks. Aadhaar-based facial authentication further secures sensitive flows such as UPI PIN resets.
“Strong authentication is foundational, but it is not sufficient on its own,” Kanvaty points out. “AI-driven risk engines allow us to analyse transaction patterns, device intelligence, and network relationships in real time.”
These systems surface coordinated scams, mule accounts, and anomalous routing behaviour early, enabling NPCI to work closely with banks and PSPs on rapid, coordinated responses.
Predictive analytics and proactive resilience
In high-velocity payment systems, resilience depends on anticipation rather than reaction. Predictive analytics plays a central role in NPCI’s approach to operational stability—analysing API behaviour, transaction flows, and usage trends to identify emerging risks before they escalate.
Real-time dashboards and live reporting frameworks enable faster coordination across the ecosystem, strengthening transaction success rates even as volumes surge.
“Risk management at population scale demands observability and predictability,” Kanvaty says. “Analytics allows us to move from reactive firefighting to proactive system stewardship.”
GenAI, deep tech, and the next innovation wave
Emerging technologies are becoming foundational to NPCI’s roadmap. A key pillar is the NPCI–IISc Centre of Excellence for Deep Tech R&D, focused on blockchain platforms, multimodal analytics, Graph AI, privacy-preserving architectures, and advanced language models.
GenAI is already in production through UPI HELP, while AI copilots are being piloted internally to assist engineers with code analysis, testing, configuration reviews, and log analysis.
“These tools free teams to focus on higher-order design, reliability, and system thinking,” Kanvaty explains.
Innovation is also extending beyond smartphones. IoT Payments with UPI enables secure payments through connected cars, smart TVs, and wearables, while initiatives such as Credit Line on UPI and UPI AutoPay are reshaping credit access and recurring commerce.
Global expansion with sovereignty at the core
NPCI’s cross-border strategy balances innovation with regulatory compliance and data sovereignty. International linkages—such as the UPI–PayNow corridor with Singapore—operate under the supervision of domestic and partner-country regulators.
“Our model ensures that countries retain full control over their data, compliance processes, and settlement infrastructure,” Kanvaty says. “Innovation cannot come at the cost of sovereignty.”
Data-driven inclusion and personalisation
Insights from billions of monthly transactions have enabled banks and fintechs to design more inclusive products—ranging from UPI AutoPay and instant micro-credit to UPI 123PAY, which brings digital payments to feature-phone users.
“Patterns that were invisible in traditional banking systems become visible at network scale,” Kanvaty notes. “That is what enables responsible innovation.”
Leadership for the next decade
As CTO of one of the world’s largest real-time payment networks, Kanvaty believes leadership development must evolve alongside technology.
“We are building leaders who think in systems, not just features,” he says. “Understanding AI, distributed architectures, privacy, and regulation together is essential.”
NPCI’s leadership culture emphasises data-driven decision-making, anticipatory operations, and continuous learning, ensuring that as technology evolves, the organisation remains resilient and future-ready.
Building the future of trusted payments
Looking ahead, NPCI is investing in cloud-native, containerised architectures, real-time observability, open-source orchestration tools, and globally interoperable frameworks—all designed to support autonomous, fault-tolerant operations.
“The next decade will be defined by payment infrastructure that is secure, interoperable, and regulator-aligned,” Kanvaty concludes. “Our focus is on building systems that nations can trust—at scale.”
In doing so, NPCI is not just shaping India’s digital payments future—it is helping define the blueprint for trusted, real-time payments worldwide.
