India's Digital Payments Chief Sees AI Driving Next Wave of Growth

India's digital payment share has increased significantly, with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) growing to over 750 million daily transactions. Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which oversees UPI, believes AI will play a crucial role in the next phase of user growth, fraud prevention, and credit distribution. During an interview with TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week (MTW) 2026 last month, Asbe said AI could drive the next half a billion users with NPCI, India's central bank, and the government working together.

"AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users. We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules. AI must also be used to provide credit to all the users and merchants who have digital footprints," he said.

"We must use AI to look at the voice and multilingual solutions to make onboarding simpler." Many companies have discussed the importance of voice as an interface in India for chatting with companies or systems. Asbe believes it's early days for voice models, which need to be more accurate. NPCI launched a voice assistant-based interactive system in 2023, but adoption has yet to take off.

Asbe noted that with the right use case, voice can become a critical component in the payment ecosystem. In the U.S., startups and public companies are racing to add AI to finance. Coinbase and Robinhood now allow agents to trade on users' behalf, and OpenAI lets users load personal account data into ChatGPT to get financial advice.

NPCI has shown demos around agentic commerce and payments with Razorpay last year, but there hasn't been a wider rollout of these capabilities. NPCI's CEO thinks that with robust regulations and a framework, India can also adopt AI-powered finance. He said there should be enough protection for users and mitigation for risk — and in case something goes wrong, the system should be able to look at the instructions and consent given by the user to an agent.

Besides the usage of models, Asbe thinks that the Indian finance ecosystem has an opportunity to build small language models. "We believe that the models will differentiate from each other based on the data sets that are made available to them," he said. "We have a very rich data set in our ecosystem.

I think there is a big opportunity for Indian companies — the banks, FinTechs, and the ecosystem — to create small language models which are sharp, specific, and as deterministic as possible." Last year, NPCI launched a model called FIMI to solve user disputes. Asbe noted that it is serving over a million users to cancel mandates and resolve issues, and is scaling fast. NPCI has long sought healthy competition between UPI apps, but data suggests that Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay have over 80% of the market share.