What happens when digital payments become deeply embedded in everyday consumer behavior and business transactions? And how are evolving payment preferences, transaction habits, and security measures reshaping India’s financial ecosystem?
As digital adoption accelerates across the country, the payments landscape continues to reveal new trends that are influencing how consumers transact, how businesses operate, and how financial institutions respond to rising scale and evolving risks.
In today’s edition of our monthly Digital Payments track, we cover the key highlights for the month of Mar’26.
In Mar’26, India's digital retail transactions reached INR 109.1T, showing an increase of ~22% from Feb’26 (INR 89.1T) and ~16% growth compared to Mar'25 (INR 94.3T). NEFT continued to dominate the payment landscape, accounting for 51.9% of all non-cash retail transaction value. Other payment modes like UPI (27.1%), CTS (6.3%), and IMPS (6.8%) maintained their positions in the digital payment ecosystem, collectively representing India's accelerating transition to digital financial transactions.
In Mar’26, India's UPI processed 22.6B transactions, averaging approximately 753M transactions per day. This represents an increase of ~11% from Feb’s 20.3B transactions. The total transaction value for Mar’26 was INR 29.5T, which also showed an increase of ~10% since Feb’26. UPI transactions showed a 24% Y-o-Y increase in volume and a 19% rise in value compared to Mar’25.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has proposed a cooling-off period of up to one hour for certain high-value digital transactions, including UPI and bank transfers between individuals, to enhance security and prevent fraud. This targeted measure aims to provide a "golden hour" for users to review, verify, or cancel mistaken or fraudulent payments before they become irreversible, specifically addressing scams driven by social engineering. Everyday merchant payments and low-value transfers will remain instant to maintain convenience, while the new reversal window is intended to build greater trust in the digital ecosystem as transaction volumes continue to scale.