SBI retail chief: UPI's next decade must chase inclusion, not just volume

Alongside ordinary payments, new use cases are emerging. In July 2026 alone, more than 800 million UPI transactions valued at over 35,000 crore rupees were authenticated using fingerprints or facial recognition. Biometric authentication is beginning to reduce friction. RuPay credit cards now ride on UPI, with the majority of their transactions flowing through the interface. UPI has also been linked to the central bank digital currency ecosystem and to ATM networks for cash withdrawals.

Setty described UPI as part of a much larger achievement: India's digital public infrastructure, the JAM trinity of Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and mobile, layered with the Account Aggregator framework, e-KYC and DigiLocker. The public and private sectors did not compete to build closed fortresses, he wrote. They collaborated on interoperable rails and then competed on the quality of services built on top of them.

The next decade will be defined as much by resilience as by innovation, Setty warned. As transaction volumes multiply, the ecosystem must continually invest in capacity, cyber security, fraud prevention, dispute resolution and high availability. Criminal ingenuity evolves alongside technological ingenuity. Social engineering, mule accounts, synthetic identities and AI-enabled fraud can erode confidence much faster than technology can build it.

His formulation was blunt. "Convenience without security is fragile. Security without convenience is exclusionary. India's achievement has been to pursue both; our responsibility is to preserve that balance." He called for stronger systems combined with more alert citizens.

Internationally, UPI now has a footprint across nine countries, with Cambodia becoming the latest addition in 2026. Setty argued the larger export is not a payment brand. It is an idea: digital infrastructure designed as a public capability on which markets innovate. For emerging economies, this offers a third path between slow legacy systems and closed proprietary ecosystems.

Yet the most important frontier remains domestic. There are still citizens who need greater digital confidence, merchants who require easier onboarding, regions where connectivity must improve, elderly customers who need assisted journeys and fraud victims who need faster resolution. Inclusion should never be measured merely by the number of people technically connected to a system, Setty wrote. The meaningful test is whether they can use it confidently, safely and independently.

The questions for the next decade are larger. Can a small business's digital footprint help it obtain timely formal credit? Can payments become safer even as they become invisible? Can the payment infrastructure support commerce conducted increasingly by machines and AI agents while preserving human consent? Setty believes the answer to each can be yes, provided India remembers what made the first decade successful: ambition combined with simplicity, technology with policy, competition with collaboration, and innovation with trust.