UPI is already the world’s largest retail fast-payment system by transaction volume, according to a 2025 IMF. Data from NPCI suggest the network processed 24.51 billion transactions worth Rs 29.82 lakh crore in August, its highest monthly volume yet. Banks currently cap such blocks at Rs 10,000 for up to 90 days, though sources told Reuters this limit may be revisited for agentic use.
Under the agentic model, a user would instead grant an AI agent defined authority such as a spending cap or restrictions on transaction type rather than confirming every purchase, according to the Economic Times. The protocol is expected to draw on two existing UPI mechanisms: UPI Circle, which lets a primary account holder delegate payment authority to a secondary user, and Reserve Pay, which lets customers block funds for multiple debits, according to Reuters sources. NPCI may soon allow AI agents to make UPI payments on your behalf. A Reuters report citing three people familiar with the matter claims India is preparing a framework that would let artificial intelligence agents make small digital payments on UPI without approval for every transaction. The move could make UPI one of the world’s largest networks built for agentic payments, and place India among the first countries with national infrastructure of this kind. Google Pay and PhonePe together account for roughly three-fourths of that volume. UPI was built around a human user approving each payment.
Industry is already moving
Meanwhile, Razorpay has also launched an Agent Studio for merchants in March using Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK. Mastercard completed its first authenticated agentic transaction in New Delhi in June, the report added, while Visa is separately building similar capabilities in India.