Razorpay and Airtel Payments Bank Partner on UPI Infrastructure

Razorpay has launched its own Unified Payments Interface (UPI) infrastructure in partnership with Airtel Payments Bank.

The new infrastructure, UPI Switch, boost success rates by 4% to 5%; handles up to 10,000 transactions per second at any given time; and enables five times faster access to UPI innovations for business, Razorpay said in a Wednesday (April 24) press release.

“This venture into UPI infrastructure marks a strategic move to manage the end-to-end merchant experience and provide the industry’s leading stack,” Khilan Haria, head of payments product at Razorpay, said in the release. “With latency below 100 milliseconds, a 4% to 5% increase in success rates, and features customized to suit business needs, our switch is crafted to enrich the payment experience and ensure that businesses can now manage the surge in UPI transactions on any sale or non-sale day.”

Seventy percent of digital transactions in India are conducted with UPI, making UPI the country’s preferred payment method, according to the release.

The success of these transactions depends on the UPI infrastructure deployed at the banks that connect with the existing UPI infrastructure to communicate between core banking systems and UPI technology while processing a transaction, the release said.

Razorpay’s new UPI Switch is designed to address the challenges faced by the existing infrastructure by providing customization features for businesses with differentiated needs, the capability to handle scale and enhance performance, and the ability to remain compliant, per the release.

Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, chief operating officer at Airtel Payments Bank, said in the release that the bank partnered with Razorpay to provide its customers with a payment experience that is seamless, secure and scalable.

“As UPI transactions continue to surge, our collaboration sets a new standard for business payments, aligning perfectly with the vision of a digital India,” Ananthanarayanan said.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-founded UPI traces its genesis to 2016 and enables instant money transfers, directly between bank accounts, PYMNTS reported in June 2023.

The appeal of instant payments, 24/7, using a mobile device as a conduit, has caught on — especially with the financial services providers, where the tally of participating banks surged from 21 at the time of the initial pilot to more than 350 banks by June 2023.