India’s rail of choice is shaping player funding and withdrawals, with pre-approved credit on UPI, tighter name-check on bank transfers, and a 24/7 RTGS backbone redefining dispute and treasury workflows.
India’s instant-pay rail UPI has become the country’s de facto tender and is now expanding into pre-sanctioned credit, a shift which will matter to betting operators evaluating India or already processing there.
In the Reserve Bank of India’s new half-year Payment Systems Report for June 2025, the central bank says UPI has “completely transformed digital payments in India,” while confirming steps that bring bank credit onto the rail and tighten the surrounding controls.
The report shows UPI accounted for 84.8% of all payment transactions by volume in in the first half of 2025, with value still concentrated on wholesale rails. The country’s real-time gross settlement system carried 68.7% of total value, underlining the split between mass-market usage and settlement heft.
The policy move to watch is the linking of pre-sanctioned credit lines to UPI, first opened to scheduled commercial banks and subsequently extended to Small Finance Banks in February 2025. That brings card-like purchasing power into irrevocable push-payments, but without importing card chargeback rules.
The RBI frames this as broadening “low-cost credit access and innovation.”
Small-value offline, instant by default
For resilience and reach, offline small-value payments remain enabled: $5.67 (₹500) per transaction with a rolling ₹2,000 cap. On UPI Lite, the per-transaction limit is ₹1,000 with a ₹5,000 total, allowing tap-through experiences without additional factor authentication.
Separately, the RBI has permitted National Payments Corporation India to set and revise peer-to-merchant limits for UPI in consultation with banks and ecosystem players, keeping peer-to-peer at $1133.24 (₹1 lakh). This flexibility could support higher-ticket merchant use cases as the rail matures.
India’s RTGS remains the value engine, according to the report. “RTGS settles about 70%, by value, of all digital transactions that take place in India,” the report states, and now runs 24x7x365 with business-continuity drills and hybrid optimisation. For operators, this means high-value treasury moves and partner settlements will continue to run over RTGS even as front-end deposits skew UPI.
A notable safeguard for payouts and withdrawals: since December 2024, beneficiary account name look-up is available in RTGS and NEFT so senders can verify the account name before releasing funds. The RBI states this is meant to “avoid mistakes and prevent frauds,” fetching the beneficiary name from the bank’s core system.
Card market: routing and storage rules that still matter
Two structural changes from the last 18 months continue to shape card acceptance where it is used alongside UPI:
- No exclusivity with networks and customer choice of network for major issuers, altering routing economics and dispute regimes that merchants face.
- Card tokenisation at device level and for card-on-file, curbing PAN storage and tightening data risk.
The report also formalises a governance shift. From May 9, 2025, amendments to the PSS Act replaced the BPSS with a Payments Regulatory Board (PRB) under the RBI Governor as the designated authority for payments regulation and supervision. Expect future licensing and rulemaking cadence to flow through the PRB.
