RBI governor flags UPI and digital rails as engines of inclusion and MSME credit
RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said digital public infrastructure—including UPI, AePS, Jan Dhan, account aggregators and the Unified Lending Interface—is lowering payment costs and widening cash-flow-based credit access for small businesses.
What happened
Reserve Bank of India · RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said fintech and digital public infrastructure including UPI are expanding financial inclusion, lowering
Key facts
- past decade
- hundreds of millions of Indians
- millions of small businesses
Why this matters
Banks, payment firms and retail platforms should prioritize partnerships around UPI, account aggregators and the Unified Lending Interface to embed credit and payments into MSME merchant workflows.
What to watch
- RBI or government announcements expanding ULI use cases, standardized MSME cash-flow underwriting, or account-aggregator participation.
- Growth in UPI merchant transactions, especially P2M volumes and small-ticket retail payments.
- Bank and NBFC launch rates for UPI-linked or transaction-data-based merchant credit products.
- Changes in merchant discount economics, settlement-time standards, or incentives for digital acceptance.
- MSME loan delinquency trends, borrower-protection rules and scrutiny of digital-lending recovery practices.
- Adoption of QR/POS-linked inventory, accounting and GST integrations among small retailers.
- Increase UPI transaction capture and reconciliation quality at store level; clean digital cash-flow records will increasingly influence credit eligibility.
- Evaluate bank, fintech and POS-provider offers for ULI/account-aggregator-enabled working-capital products, comparing effective annual cost, repayment cadence, data permissions and settlement linkage.
- Use interoperable payment acceptance rather than proprietary wallets alone to preserve customer choice and reduce dependency on a single platform.
- Build consent-management and data-governance practices for GST, bank-account, POS and payment data shared with lenders.
- Model whether faster settlement and credit access can support smaller, more frequent inventory purchases and reduce stock-out risk.