New Delhi, Dec. 11 -- New Delhi: Few economies have seen everyday payment habits change as quickly as India has. In less than 10 years, the smallest transactions have shifted from cash to an instant digital rail used hundreds of millions of times a day. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) today supports an estimated 491 million users and processed around 185 billion payments in the financial year ended 2025-more than 500 million transactions every day. By November 2025, that daily volume had climbed to nearly 700 million.

What stands out is not just the scale but the composition of this activity. Much of UPI's growth has come from the low-value, high-frequency payments that once moved almost entirely in cash including daily household pu...