India's cashless transactions outpace Europe and North America combined for first time

Recent proof has come out of Asia’s digital payments domination - in particular India’s - over developed nations traditionally associated with higher financial sophistication.

According to Invezz.com, India is the single fastest-growing region for cashless transactions in 2023 and 2024, which cites a raft of recent research on this.

Asia the world's number one

On May 10^th Statista, citing recent research from the Capgemini Research Institute for Financial Services Analysis, showed how the Asia-Pacific region, led largely by India, will make more digital payments than Europe and North America combined.¹

This is the first known time in history that the APAC region as a whole has significantly outpaced both Europe and the United States, in terms of cashless payment methods, at the same time.

The rise and rise of UPI

The researchers responsible for the discovery, Capgemini, placed especial emphasis on India as the driving force behind this brave new world. As Capgemini notes, the turning point for India really came back in 2016, when the National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) introduced the Unified Payment Interface (UPI).²

UPI is an interoperable payments system that both individual customers and businesses can use to make instant, near real-time payments across multiple bank accounts for C2C and C2B transactions. After just six years, UPI transaction value and volume overtook credit and debit card totals by a significant margin in 2022 as India’s preferred payment method of choice.

National Payments Corporation of India figures

Furthermore, the latest statistics from the NPCI show that the amount of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions reached over 1,330 crore last month.³

Bearing in mind that one crore is on average $133 514.00 in USD, this means that more than $177 million were paid using UPI in April alone, in India, alone.

The same NCPI statistics show that it’s not uncommon for the volume and value of UPI transactions grow by 10% or more every month. Compare this to the fact that PwC estimates that North America’s cashless transactions will only grow 35% between 2025 and 2030 in total.

In fact, cash still makes up 16% of Americans’ transactions in 2024, according to recent research by Clearly Payments, while the same report stated that European countries like Germany and Austria had an even higher reliance on cash than the USA.⁴