As UPI continues to experience frequent outages, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a review meeting on Monday. During the meeting, she urged all stakeholders to collaborate in addressing the existing infrastructure gaps. She emphasised the goal of achieving one billion UPI transactions per day within the next 2-3 years. This meeting followed three major outages that UPI encountered recently, with users across the country facing transaction failures on April 12, marking the third incident in less than two weeks. Prior outages were reported on March 26 and April 2.
The meeting saw participation from senior officials in the finance ministry, including Finance Secretary Ajay Seth, Financial Services Secretary M. Nagaraju, and NPCI MD and CEO Dilip Asbe. The Finance Minister also encouraged officials to ramp up efforts to onboard more users and merchants onto the UPI platform, aiming to expand its reach and impact.
Discussions revolved around enhancing the resilience, scalability, and real-time monitoring capabilities of the UPI infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted service delivery and bolster user trust. NPCI officials reported that between 2021-22 and 2024-25, approximately 26 crore new users and 5.5 crore new merchants have been successfully brought onto the UPI platform, resulting in around 45 crore active users annually.
Meanwhile, Newer Unified Payments Interface (UPI) applications, including Flipkart-backed Super.Money, Navi, Bhim, and Cred, are gaining significant momentum in the payments market, fueled by a notable increase in UPI transactions. These emerging platforms are enticing consumers with attractive cashback offers and various incentives.
According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which manages the UPI network, these newer players have raised their collective market share to about 4 percent in March 2025, up from 2.3 percent in October 2024 and virtually negligible a year prior. Nevertheless, PhonePe and Google Pay continue to dominate the landscape, retaining a substantial combined market share of 82 percent.
ALSO READ: Garena Free Fire MAX Redeem Codes for April 29, 2025: Get free diamonds, bundles along with super rewards