A casual question about a payments app led Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra to one of India's most consequential — and least celebrated — architects of the digital economy. On Monday, 26 October 2026, Mahindra shared the story of his conversation with Dilip Asbe, MD and CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), calling it 'illuminating, to put it mildly' — and announcing he had switched to the BHIM app.

The railroad metaphor that reframes how India pays

Mahindra reached for an analogy that cuts straight to the point: 'Think of them as trains running on a railway network. NPCI provides the tracks.' PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, BHIM — the apps millions of Indians open dozens of times a day — are all running on infrastructure that NPCI quietly built and maintains. The scale of that infrastructure is staggering.

In September 2026, UPI alone processed over 2,400 crore transactions — more than 80 crore transactions every single day. Mahindra called it a 'true global force multiplier', and by transaction volume, India is now the world's largest real-time payments market. A fact worth sitting with.

UPI's decade-long climb to the top of global payments

The foundation was laid in 2016, when the Reserve Bank of India and NPCI launched the Unified Payments Interface — a low-cost, interoperable instant payment rail designed to let any bank account talk to any other via a mobile phone. The ambition was audacious; the execution, methodical. What followed was one of the fastest adoptions of public financial infrastructure anywhere in the world.

Private fintechs piled onto the rails, competing ferociously on product while the underlying plumbing — real-time settlement, fraud checks, interoperability — stayed public and open. That architecture is precisely why India outpaced every other market on real-time transaction volume. And Asbe has been at the centre of it, overseeing NPCI through its most explosive growth phase while the organisation now eyes new frontiers: credit on UPI, cross-border linkages, and fresh payment rails for wider financial services.

Ambition without airs — what Mahindra took away from the meeting

But Mahindra's post is as much a character portrait as a technology explainer. What struck him most about Asbe, he wrote, was 'not the scale of his achievement, not his knowledge of the technology — his humility.' He described meeting 'a man with no airs, no sense of self-importance and seemingly little interest in the spotlight. Just immense pride in what his team has accomplished.'

He added a detail that landed warmly: Asbe's mother was a teacher, and Mahindra mused that 'mothers who are teachers have a special knack for instilling values that last a lifetime.' It is the kind of observation that turns a business post into a Monday-morning reflection — deliberate, given the #MondayMotivation tag. The kicker Mahindra wrote for himself: 'Ambition and humility can indeed travel together on the railroad to success.'

He also made one concrete move: ditching his previous app for BHIM — India's own, NPCI-built interface to the same UPI rails — a small gesture that carries its own message about backing indigenous digital infrastructure.