Daily UPI transactions set to touch ₹100 crore shortly, says RBI official

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions worth around ₹75 crore are processed daily in the country, and the figure is expected to soon reach ₹100 crore, said V.S. Prajish, General Manager, Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

He was speaking at a panel discussion on ‘Combating Cyber Financial Fraud: Challenges and Solutions’ during the annual South Zone Conference on Telecom Security organised by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) here on Thursday. Nearly 85% of digital transactions in India are conducted through UPI, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary in April 2026.

‘Fraud averted’

Mr. Prajish said that all banks, payment aggregators, non-banking financial institutions, and cooperative banks have been directed to integrate their systems with the Digital Intelligence Platform (DIP) developed by the DoT. This integration facilitates the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI) and the Mobile Number Validation (MNV) platform through API (Application Programming Interface). The initiative has helped avert potential fraud worth around ₹500 crore in the last six to seven months. Often, banks are unable to verify whether a mobile number is ‘clean’ when linking it to an account. The MNV platform will ensure that the correct mobile number is mapped to the account.

Recently, during the monetary policy announcement, the RBI Governor stated that a compensatory framework would be introduced. Under this, customers who lose money to financial fraud will be compensated, at least once, up to ₹25,000 or 85% of the amount lost even if the customer is at fault, such as by sharing passwords.

‘Golden minutes’

Highlighting the challenges in combating financial fraud, Mr. Prajish noted that money siphoned off from customers is transferred across multiple bank accounts and institutions within seconds. “The golden hour once considered crucial in crime investigation is no longer a golden hour but golden minutes. This creates many difficulties for banks in freezing funds. Moreover, money is withdrawn through ATMs and various payment terminals, many of which lack CCTV coverage or have poor-quality recordings, which are often no stored either,” he said.