New Delhi: The adoption of digital payments across the country recorded a 10.7 per cent year-on-year increase (as of March 2025), according to the latest Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data.
The Central Bank uses an index that evaluates the adoption of digital payments across the country, known as the RBI’s Digital Payments indicator (DPI).
“The increase in the RBI- Digital Payments Index (DPI) index was driven by significant growth in parameters viz. payment infrastructure – supply-side factors and payment performance across the country over the period,” the RBI said in a statement.
The supply-side factors in index measures POS terminals, ATMs, QR codes, bank branches offering digital services. The payment performance measures volume and value of transactions across UPI, IMPS, NEFT, RTGS and other payment modes including internet banking.
RBI’s DPI grew to 493.22 in March 2025, up from 465.33 in September 2024, indicating that the growth of digital payments across the nation has not slowed.
Earlier, RBI had recorded a 13.3 per cent growth in DPI for the period from March 2023 to March 2024. In March 2024, the RBI-DPI score was recorded at 445.50.
The apex bank releases the index twice a year, recording the DPI at the end of March and September each year. The index indicated the extent of digitisation of payments in the country and was constituted with March 2018 as the base period, which was assigned a score of 100.
The DPI included five broad parameters that measured the deepening and penetration of digital payments in the country over time. The parameters are payment enablers (weight 25 per cent), payment infrastructure at demand side (10 per cent), payment infrastructure at supply-side (15 per cent), payment performance (45 per cent) and consumer centricity (5 per cent).
The new data comes at a time when UPI surpassed global payments giant Visa. India became the global leader in fast payments, as UPI processed over Rs 24.03 lakh crore in payments through 18.39 billion transactions in June. UPI now powers around 85 per cent of all digital transactions in India and nearly 50 per cent of all real-time digital payments across the world.
(IANS)
