Engineering trust at population scale: How NPCI is building the future of real-time digital payments

When India speaks about digital public infrastructure, few systems illustrate scale, resilience, and trust as powerfully as the payments rails built by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). At the heart of this transformation sits UPI—processing over 20 billion transactions every month, valued at more than $280 billion—alongside IMPS and RuPay, forming one of the world’s most extensive real-time payment ecosystems.

For Vishal Anand Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer at NPCI, the challenge is no longer about proving scale. It is about engineering intelligence, resilience, and trust into systems that operate continuously for an entire nation.

“India’s real-time payments ecosystem operates at a scale that is unparalleled globally,” Kanvaty notes. “At this level, consistency, reliability, and user experience can only be sustained through deep analytics and continuous, data-driven visibility across the ecosystem.”

AI at the core of a national-scale experience

As transaction volumes ...