India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has crossed 80 crore transactions per day — equivalent to more than 2,400 crore transactions a month — making it the world's largest real-time payment system, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Sunday, 25 October 2026. She was speaking at the inauguration of the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) Greenfield Data Centre and Training Institute in Khordha, Odisha, which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

UPI's Staggering Growth Since 2016

Sitharaman highlighted that UPI's annual transaction volume has surged approximately 13,000 times since 2016–17, underscoring one of the most dramatic adoption curves in global payments history. What began as a nascent interbank transfer protocol has, within less than a decade, become the backbone of India's retail financial system — processing more digital transactions daily than most nations handle in a year.

The scale is notable not just domestically. UPI has already expanded to multiple countries, and its daily volumes now comfortably exceed those of Visa and Mastercard combined in terms of transaction count, according to publicly available global payments data.

Fintech Ecosystem and First-Time Users

The Finance Minister said UPI's rapid growth has catalysed a vibrant fintech ecosystem that is extending credit, insurance, and investment access to millions of first-time users across India. This broadening of financial services beyond urban centres represents a structural shift in how retail finance reaches underserved populations — a goal that earlier banking correspondent models had only partially achieved.

"The vibrant fintech ecosystem built on these initiatives is bringing credit, insurance and investment opportunities to first-time users," Sitharaman said at the event.

Data Centres: The 'Vaults of the Digital Age'

Describing data centres as the 'vaults of the digital age,' Sitharaman outlined a series of government measures to strengthen digital infrastructure. She noted that data centres were granted infrastructure status in 2022, and the Union Budget 2026–27 announced a tax holiday for foreign companies providing global cloud services from data centres situated in India — a move aimed at attracting hyperscale investment.

The newly inaugurated RBI Greenfield Data Centre in Khordha will house the central bank's mission-critical systems, including the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) platforms. The co-located Training Institute, which includes a dedicated research wing, will focus on building expertise in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and data centre management, according to Sitharaman.

Strategic Significance of the RBI Facility

The Odisha facility is part of a broader push to geographically diversify and harden India's payments infrastructure, reducing systemic concentration risk that has historically centred on Mumbai. Housing RTGS and NEFT — the two rails that settle trillions of rupees in high-value transactions daily — outside the financial capital adds a critical layer of resilience to the national payments architecture.

This comes amid growing global concern over cyberattacks targeting financial infrastructure, and as India's digital payments footprint expands into Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and beyond through bilateral UPI linkages. With PM Modi inaugurating the facility and the Finance Minister underlining both its operational and symbolic significance, the RBI's Khordha campus signals that India is building the institutional depth to match its payments ambition.