UPI 'Soft Power By Design', May Shape Geopolitics: Nikhil Kamath
Kamath shared many infographics in his post, highlighting the burgeoning popularity and success of the Unified Payments Interface.
Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath lauded the Unified Payments Interface system on Thursday, claiming that it has the same potential as oil to impact geopolitics.
"If oil shaped geopolitics, can payments protocols do it too? An India-made standard other countries plug into is soft power by design. Should UPI be an export, not just a success?" Kamath wrote in a post on social media platform X.
Kamath shared many infographics in his post, highlighting the burgeoning popularity and success of the online payment method. Via UPI, users can send or receive money to someone's phone number or by scanning a QR Code.
He highlighted that UPI had beat out Visa as the platform that had the largest volume of daily transactions on the globe with 65 crore a day, as opposed to Visa's 64 crore per day. Mastercard came in third with 45 crore transactions each day.
"UPI did in nine years what Visa could not do in six decades," the infographic said.
It said that UPI achieved this position in nine years with seven countries, which Visa and Mastercard were unable to do in 60 years across more than 200 countries.
"All this while UPO does the tough job of settling 7,500 transactions/sec instantly, while the peers don't," one of the inforgraphics said.
After Covid, UPI's transaction volume jumped 14 times and nine times in value, according to Kamath, who shared a table in his post documenting this rise from zero crore in value from June 2016 to Rs 2,404 crore in value in June 2025.
It also noted that UPI makes up 83% of all of India's total retail digital transactions, and that it processes 12 times the transaction value of all cards in India.
The inforgraphics further stated that UPI is used in one in every two digital payments in the world.
