NPCI Chief: UPI's AI Edge Lies in Payment Data, Not Cutting-Edge Models

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India's National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) chief Dilip Asbe told TechCrunch that AI will play a central role in UPI's next phase of growth, targeting over one billion daily transactions from the current 750 million. Asbe highlighted specific AI use cases including fraud detection, small-credit distribution, and voice-based multilingual onboarding, rather than broad or experimental applications. A key insight from Asbe is that small, domain-specific AI models trained on India's rich payments data can outperform large general-purpose models for narrow tasks. Despite UPI's scale, the platform faces a market concentration problem, with PhonePe and Google Pay together holding over 80% share, while the government-backed BHIM UPI holds just around 1%. A regulatory cap requiring no single app to exceed 30% market share is set for December 2026, but meaningful redistribution has yet to occur.

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