CARD91 Unveils UPI Platform to Power India's Next Digital Payment Wave

BENGALURU, India – June 26, 2026 – As India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) continues its meteoric rise, processing billions of transactions annually, a critical challenge has emerged from behind the scenes: the immense technical complexity of integrating with the revolutionary payment system. Today, fintech infrastructure company CARD91 announced a significant move to address this bottleneck, going live with a comprehensive UPI Issuance platform designed to serve as a foundational layer for the entire ecosystem.

The launch positions CARD91 as a key enabler for banks, payment service providers (PSPs), fintech startups, and large enterprises that have struggled with the high costs, long timelines, and regulatory hurdles associated with building their own UPI capabilities from scratch. By offering a unified, production-ready infrastructure, the company aims to abstract away the backend complexities, allowing businesses to focus on creating innovative payment experiences for their customers.

Lowering the Barrier to a Digital Revolution

India's UPI has become a global case study in digital payment adoption, with a staggering 48% year-over-year growth and transaction volumes now counted in the billions annually. However, this success has created a paradox. While consumers enjoy seamless, instant payments, the institutions that want to offer these services—particularly regional banks, credit unions, and emerging fintechs—often find the technical and compliance requirements prohibitive.

Direct integration with the UPI network involves navigating intricate protocols for switching, settlement, dispute resolution, and ongoing compliance with guidelines from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). This requires significant investment in specialized technology, skilled engineering teams, and robust security frameworks, creating a high barrier to entry.

CARD91's new platform is engineered to dismantle these barriers. It functions as a "UPI-in-a-box" solution, providing a single, API-driven layer that handles the heavy lifting. "Today, we are live with UPI — something we've been diligently working on for the past few months," said Ajay Pandey, CEO and Founder of CARD91, in a statement. "Every regulated entity that wishes to offer UPI...now has access to a trusted, production-ready backbone with significantly faster market reach. India's digital payment ambitions are no longer limited by technical complexity. They are limited only by imagination."

This strategic shift from in-house builds to third-party infrastructure mirrors trends in other technology sectors, such as cloud computing, where companies like Amazon Web Services enabled a generation of startups by providing scalable infrastructure on demand. For the Indian financial sector, this move could unlock a new wave of competition and innovation.

Deconstructing the Digital Backbone

At the heart of CARD91's offering is an end-to-end infrastructure that covers the entire UPI lifecycle, for both issuing and acquiring payments. On the issuance side, the platform manages transaction processing, linking customer funding accounts, and integrating with a bank's core systems. This allows an institution to quickly enable its customers to send and receive money via UPI.

On the acquiring side, the platform provides a sophisticated toolkit for merchants and businesses. This includes an AI-led merchant onboarding system that automates know-your-customer (KYC) processes and correctly classifies merchant categories (MCC), a critical compliance step. It also handles the creation and management of Virtual Payment Addresses (VPAs), payment collections, refunds, and detailed settlement reporting.

Significantly, the platform is built to support the next generation of UPI use cases. Beyond standard transactions from bank accounts (UPI over CASA), it is engineered for UPI over credit—enabling credit lines to be extended through the UPI network—and UPI over Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPIs). This forward-looking architecture allows financial institutions to not only participate in the current UPI ecosystem but also to innovate and launch new credit and payment products. The company's proprietary UPI switch, "Blitz," is designed for high performance, reportedly capable of handling over 2,000 transactions per second with 99.99% uptime, ensuring the reliability needed to support massive scale.

Navigating a Competitive and Regulated Landscape

CARD91 is entering a dynamic and increasingly competitive market. The critical need for robust UPI infrastructure has given rise to an entire sub-industry of "fintech enablers," with companies like Juspay, M2P Fintech, and Setu also offering powerful UPI stacks. This "infrastructure race" is a sign of a maturing digital payments ecosystem, where specialization is becoming crucial for maintaining stability and fostering innovation as transaction volumes head towards NPCI’s projection of one billion per day.

In this crowded field, CARD91 is differentiating itself with a "compliance-first" approach. The company emphasizes that its platform is built in strict adherence to RBI and NPCI frameworks, making it "audit-ready" from day one. For regulated entities, this focus on compliance is a major value proposition, as it de-risks the process of launching new services and ensures alignment with a constantly evolving regulatory landscape. According to industry analysts, the ability to quickly adapt to new circulars and security mandates is a key differentiator for infrastructure providers.

This focus extends to security, with the platform adhering to standards like PCI DSS and ISO 27001, and incorporating multi-layered security protocols essential for protecting the integrity of the payments network. By taking on the burden of compliance and security, providers like CARD91 allow their clients to accelerate their go-to-market timelines from months or even years to a matter of weeks.

Fueling the Next Wave of UPI Growth

The launch of sophisticated infrastructure platforms like CARD91’s is not just about simplifying access; it's about ensuring the future scalability and resilience of India's digital payment system. With projections showing UPI transactions potentially reaching over two billion per day by 2030, the underlying technology must be capable of handling exponential growth without compromising performance or reliability.

By providing a scalable backbone, these infrastructure players are laying the groundwork for the next phase of financial innovation. This includes the deeper integration of credit into the UPI ecosystem, the development of more personalized payment solutions for consumers, and the expansion of digital payments into new segments of the economy. Furthermore, as UPI begins its global expansion, with cross-border functionality now live in several countries, the role of robust, adaptable infrastructure will become even more critical.

For CARD91, this launch marks a pivotal step in its ambition to become a central pillar of India's payment infrastructure. For the broader market, it signals that the era of complex, bespoke UPI integrations may be giving way to a more accessible, platform-based approach, empowering a wider range of players to participate in and shape the future of digital finance in India.