Payments & fintech.

Payments & fintech covers the card networks, payment gateways, wallets, bill-payment and lending-distribution platforms, and NPCI that move India's retail payments and monetise the customer relationships built on top of them. UPI, the free real-time rail, processed about ₹300 lakh crore of transactions (87% of GDP) in FY26, but that transaction value is money moved, not income; the industry that moves it earned about ₹1.0 lakh crore of revenue and added an estimated ₹0.8 lakh crore of value, just 0.25% of national GVA, because the fastest-growing rail (UPI) carries no price while the profitable rail (cards) is a much smaller ₹25 lakh crore of spend. Growth is driven less by UPI volume itself than by monetisation layered on it: credit on UPI, merchant credit and software for 65 million UPI-accepting merchants, cross-border UPI links, and account-aggregator-based underwriting, with the base case projecting 16% annual GVA growth to ₹3.1 lakh crore by FY35. The industry is the least represented part of Indian finance in the equity market, with most value sitting in unlisted, foreign-funded companies such as PhonePe and Razorpay, and its trajectory hinges heavily on whether India's zero-MDR policy on UPI is ever revisited.

UPI transaction value

300 ₹ lakh crore (87% of GDP; ~230 billion payments) · FY26

Industry revenue pool

1.0 ₹ lakh crore · FY26

Estimated industry GVA

0.8 ₹ lakh crore (0.25% of national GVA) · FY26

Profit pool

0.12 ₹ lakh crore · FY26

Listed market capitalisation

2 ₹ lakh crore (Jul-26) · FY26

Direct employment

0.35 mn (fintech payrolls ~0.2 mn; NPCI/networks/gateways ~0.05 mn; plus remittance agents, gig collectors) · FY26

Card spending, credit + debit (POS/online)

25.0 ₹ lakh crore (credit ₹21 LC on 110 mn cards) · FY26

Credit cards in force

110 million · FY26