

Visa bets on cheaper tech and consumer choice to take on the UPI juggernaut
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Global payments network Visa is stepping up its push for merchant acceptance in India as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) cements its lead in everyday digital payments, a top Visa India executive told Mint. The company is betting that cheaper acceptance tools, card-based subscriptions, and a broader set of payment choices can help it win share among both small and large merchants.Ramakrishnan Gopalan, chief product officer, India and South Asia at Visa, said the company’s first pitch to merchants is built around consumer choice.
He added that merchants should not be offering customers only one payment option in a market that still has a large card base.“Cards should remain part of the payment mix as it tends to help commerce grow more when consumers have more than one way to pay,” he said. India had about 110 million active credit cards and about a billion active debit cards as of March 2026, according to the latest RBI data cited by external reports.Gopalan also argued that cards can offer a smoother customer experience, especially through tap-to-pay for offline merchants and tokenised transactions for online checkouts.
The RBI introduced tokenisation for online card transactions in 2022, requiring merchants to stop storing actual card details and use a unique token instead to improve security.He said these features can make it easier for customers to make repeat purchases with the same merchant, though he acknowledged that cost remains a hurdle, especially for smaller merchants in offline retail, many of whom still seek cheaper alternatives.The biggest alternative, of course, is UPI, which has come to dominate merchant payments through QR codes. UPI’s share of India’s digital
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