Road Ahead for UPI: Free Public Infrastructure or Yet Another Payment Mechanism?

With its widespread adoption, UPI is now here to stay. Regulators must now switch their focus on ensuring fair competition in the digital payments space. The zero-charge framework gives UPI an advantage over other digital payments and a big task for regulators is to determine how it can be phased out going forward. With the market currently dominated by a handful of players at the front-end (GPay, PhonePe, Paytm) and monopolised by NPCI and banks at the back-end, enabling competition in each layer of UPI to tackle this would be the sensible direction to take for UPI to sustain on its own.