Electronic Payment Systems in India

2023: India accounts for 48.5% of global electronic payments

At the end of 2023, 48.5% of global digital payments made in real time were made to India. In addition, the country became the leader in the volume of such remittances, which amounted to $115.3 billion. This data was disclosed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in mid-August 2024.

The RBI report highlighted that India has overtaken all other countries in terms of electronic payments. Remittances, increasingly driven by the use of mobile money and digital platforms, are estimated to have reached $857.3 billion globally in 2023. India became the leader in this segment.

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According to the globalcio.com resource, the digital economy accounts for about a tenth of India's GDP, and the figure is expected to reach one fifth of GDP by 2026, based on the growth rate recorded since 2014. According to RBI, the aggregate annual growth rate (CAGR) of digital payments was 50% by volume and 10% by value for the period 2017-2024. In particular, 164 billion transactions were carried out in 2023-2024.

India is at the forefront of digitalization, the report noted. However, the report also said cybersecurity posed a major challenge due to the diversity of cyber threats targeting digital financial infrastructure. The number of security incidents handled by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) rose from 53,117 in 2017 to 1.32 million in January-October 2023.

According to the Indian Ministry of Finance, GDP growth in fiscal 2023-2024 was 7.6%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated India's contribution to global economic growth in 2023 at 16%. In fiscal 2024-2025, the Reserve Bank of India forecast 7 per cent GDP growth and the IMF forecast 6.8 per cent^[1]

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