Why this exists
India modernised small payments and left the large ones where they were.
UPI made a ₹200 payment effortless and safe. A ₹2 lakh payment to a supplier still means typing an account number and an IFSC by hand, with the money released on the number alone. Most of the money that moves through India's digital payment systems moves that way.
Where the money moves, and where the count moves.
Financial year 2025-26, provisional, from the Reserve Bank's Payment System Indicators.
| Rail | Payments in the year | Money moved | Average payment |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTGS (every payment ₹2 lakh or more) | 35 crore | ₹2,273.7 lakh crore | about ₹65 lakh |
| NEFT | 1,010 crore | ₹502.3 lakh crore | about ₹49,700 |
| IMPS | 494 crore | ₹76.7 lakh crore | about ₹15,500 |
| UPI | 24,162 crore | ₹314.2 lakh crore | about ₹1,300 |
| All digital payments | 28,174 crore | ₹3,251.0 lakh crore |
Value
85%
of all digital payment value went over NEFT and RTGS, on under 4% of the payments. UPI is the mirror image: 86% of the payments, under 10% of the value.
Different money
₹49,700
is the average NEFT payment. The average UPI payment is ₹1,300. One is a shop sale; the other is a supplier being paid. They were never the same kind of payment.
Typed by hand
35 crore
RTGS payments a year, each of ₹2 lakh or more, each addressed by someone typing a number into a form. The segment above ₹1 lakh starts there; NEFT adds many more.
Where we stand on the fee
The UPI charge is fair. We are not here to fight it.
UPI gives a customer an instant payment at the counter and costs real money to run at 24,000 crore payments a year. The banks, NPCI and the apps that keep it running should be paid. What we want is for each payment to use the right rail: UPI for the counter, a bank transfer for the supplier. The large payments were never UPI's job, and today they are nobody's.
What the regulator says it wants
The Reserve Bank's Payments Vision 2028 says the challenge is now "deepening 'trust' in payment systems", and names "user empowerment, safeguards against fraud" and "ease of doing business" as its focus. It proposes that the customer's bank and the beneficiary's bank "jointly bear the liability arising from unauthorised digital payment transactions". A bank that will share liability for where money lands has every reason to want each beneficiary verified when it is added. That is what the code gives it.
The modernisation ladder
NEFT and RTGS can get what UPI got, in layers.
The Reserve Bank built RTGS in 2004 and NEFT in 2005. NPCI built UPI in 2016, and UPI is what modernisation looks like: an address instead of a number, a scan instead of a form, a name shown before money moves. The old rails got none of that. They can, one layer at a time, and each layer is good for the banks as well as for the businesses.
| Layer | What it is | Who delivers it | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A code for a bank account with check digits, a QR and a link that open a pay page, and verification of the holder's name | SeedhaPay, with the format open | Live |
| 2 | Adding a beneficiary from the code in one step; bulk beneficiary files for corporate netbanking | SeedhaPay | Building |
| 3 | Bank apps open on "Confirm beneficiary" from a seedhapay.in link, through a read-only API | Banks, with our API | Designed |
| 4 | Banks read the QR natively, and issue codes to their own current-account customers | Banks, NPCI, the banks' association | Later |
IMPS gains along the way. Its volume fell from 600 crore payments in 2023-24 to 494 crore in 2025-26 as UPI absorbed the small ones. Once a beneficiary is easy to add and verified, IMPS becomes the natural rail from ₹50,000 to ₹5 lakh, where instant confirmation matters, and it is a rail on which the bank earns a fee. That inference is ours; the fee schedules and the volume trend are the Reserve Bank's.
Cash
Every large payment that moves from cash to a bank rail becomes visible.
Currency in circulation reached ₹41.68 lakh crore at the end of 2025-26, up 11.9% in the year. The law already draws the lines. Receiving ₹2 lakh or more in cash from one person in a day, or for one transaction or event, is prohibited under section 269ST of the Income-tax Act, with a penalty equal to the amount. Paying more than ₹10,000 in cash for a business expense to one person in a day loses the deduction under section 40A(3). A business has every reason to move such payments to a bank rail. Today it has no easy way to. Nobody publishes how many large cash payments still happen, and we will not guess. We only make the bank transfer as easy as the cash.
Sources
- RBI, Payment System Indicators, March 2026 release (FY2025-26, provisional)
- RBI, Payments Vision 2028, March 2026
- RBI NEFT FAQ: credit is released on the account number alone
- Currency in circulation, FY26
- Department of Financial Services, FAQ on the UPI merchant discount rate, September 2026
- NPCI defers the start of the charge past Diwali, 13 October 2026
- Income-tax Act, sections 269ST, 271DA and 40A(3)
Nothing on this page implies endorsement by the Reserve Bank, NPCI or any bank. SeedhaPay moves no money and holds no funds.