By Shishir Prashant 
PrashantNews
With Greece and Maldives becoming the latest additions in 2026, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is now accepted in 11 foreign countries for payment, an official report said on Monday.
UPI’s international footprint has also expanded rapidly. It is operational in countries including Bhutan, Nepal, Singapore, the UAE, France, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Qatar, Cambodia, Greece and the Maldives. “UPI has emerged as the backbone of the country’s digital payments revolution, transforming the way individuals, businesses and government entities transact over the past decade,” the report said.
Developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI was launched on a pilot basis in April 2016 with 21 member banks and opened to the public later that year. The launch of the BHIM app in December 2016 further accelerated adoption by enabling direct bank-to-bank payments through mobile phones.
In July 2026 alone, UPI recorded 2,365.8 crore transactions worth ₹29.87 lakh crore, with 741 banks live on the platform. The International Monetary Fund has highlighted UPI’s global significance, noting that it accounted for around 49 per cent of global real-time payment transaction volume in 2024.
Over the years, UPI has evolved from a simple real-time payment platform into a comprehensive digital payments ecosystem. UPI 2.0, launched in 2018, introduced features such as invoice viewing, mandates and overdraft account linking, while UPI AutoPay enabled recurring payments for subscriptions, insurance premiums, utility bills and EMIs.
The platform subsequently expanded its reach with UPI 123PAY for feature-phone users, UPI Lite for low-value payments and the linking of credit cards with UPI. In March 2022, UPI crossed five billion monthly transactions and, during FY 2021-22, processed transactions worth more than US$1 trillion.
Further innovations have included Credit Line on UPI, UPI Circle and enhanced transaction limits for sectors such as taxation, capital markets, insurance, healthcare and education. In 2025, on-device authentication and Aadhaar-based face authentication added further convenience to the system.
The scale of UPI’s growth has been extraordinary. Annual transaction volume increased from just two crore transactions in FY 2016-17 to more than 24,162 crore in FY 2025-26 — a nearly 12,000-fold increase. Transaction value rose from ₹0.07 lakh crore to around ₹314 lakh crore, representing growth of more than 4,000 times.