A G20 policy document prepared by the World Bank says that India has achieved financial inclusion targets in just 6 years which would otherwise have taken at least 47 years. Transaction accounts from approximately one-fourth of adults in 2008 are now over 80 percent” the report says.
*UPI: A Unified Payments Interface is a smartphone application that allows users to transfer money between bank accounts. It is a single-window mobile payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India. It eliminates the need to enter bank details or other sensitive information each time a customer initiates a transaction.
The UPI platform has gained significant popularity in India; more than 9.41 billion transactions valued at $190 billion were transacted in May 2023 alone. “For the financial year 2022-23, the total value of UPI transactions was nearly 50% of India’s nominal GDP,” the World Bank report said.
“Banks’ costs of onboarding customers in India decreased from $23 to $0.1 with the use of Digital Payment Infrastructure. In just six years, it (the India stack) has achieved a remarkable 80% financial inclusion rate — a feat that would have taken nearly five decades.
This G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) document has been prepared by the World Bank as an implementing partner of the GPFI with the guidance of and inputs from the G20 India Presidency represented by the finance ministry and the Reserve Bank of India. India is planning to showcase its successes on the digital payments and financial inclusion front at the G20 Summit in New Delhi this weekend.
