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.
Elephant in the room
The biggest alternative, of course, is UPI, which has come to dominate merchant payments through QR codes. UPI’s share of India’s digital payments volume rose to 84% in 2025, according to the RBI’s payment system report. In March 2026 alone, UPI processed a record 22.64 billion transactions worth ₹29.53 trillion, highlighting the scale of the network Visa is trying to compete with at checkout.
Visa’s response, Gopalan said, is to make card acceptance cheaper for merchants, “whether it is the low-cost devices that we are working on with a couple of players in the market, or converting your phone itself into an acceptance device. Merchants with near field communication (NFC)-enabled smartphones may not need separate card machines in their stores," he added.
Gopalan said Visa will havte to compare its merchant pricing with that of other payment options and be flexible where needed to increase acceptance among merchants. “It’s our job to make sure that we benchmark our unit economics with everything in the market. And if need be, we will tweak our economics to make that work,” he said.
In simple terms, that means Visa is willing to adjust the cost of acceptance in parts of the market where merchants see cards as too expensive compared with QR-based payments.
‘Tokenisation was a game-changer’
Over the past few years, Visa has tied up with Indian partners across acceptance and checkout infrastructure as it tries to stay relevant in a market dominated by UPI. These partnerships have led to devices such as Pine Labs Mini, an all-in-one QR code, card and soundbox product, and an all-in-one point-of-sale device with HDFC Bank. Before that, Visa had rolled out card-on-file tokenisation with online platforms such as BigBasket, Grofers, MakeMyTrip and others.
Gopalan called tokenisation a “game changer” and a “massive, massive unlock” for India, arguing that in a fast-growing e-commerce market, consumer trust is the foundation of digital card payments. He said that from the RBI’s perspective, tokenisation was about removing card numbers from the ecosystem and replacing them with tokens, while from the consumer’s perspective, was about replacing anxiety with trust. He explicitly compared tokenisation with the introduction of one-time-password (OTP) authentication around 15 years ago.
“When OTP first emerged, many in the industry worried it would make digital transactions too cumbersome because consumers had to rely on mobile networks, receive the OTP, and enter it correctly, but over time Indians came to see OTP as a standard marker of trust and legitimacy,” Gopalan said. Tokenisation, he said, has had a similar effect on card payments. The scale of that shift is visible in adoption, with Visa now having “more than 550 to 600 million tokens” in the market, he added.
RuPay's UPI advantage
Asked about Visa’s disadvantage regarding RuPay’s exclusive linkage to UPI, Gopalan noted that the company must learn to coexist with domestic real-time payment systems. He added that there is “no playbook” for navigating this as every market is different.
In India, Visa’s approach is to work with stakeholders to see how it can coexist with such systems while also contributing to their safety and security, he said. Visa has previously worked with the RBI on digital payments infrastructure and could bring its risk-management capabilities to UPI and other real-time payment systems, Gopalan added.
The RBI allowed RuPay credit cards to be linked to UPI in June 2022. By October 2025 RuPay had captured an 18% share of India’s credit card market, according to a Moneycontrol report, with cumulative monthly transaction value on UPI estimated around Rs18,000 crore and total monthly spending, including swipe and tap-and-pay transactions, around ₹35,000 crore.
