India's payment network now handles more than 750 million transactions a day, and the man who runs it says artificial intelligence is what drives the next wave. For Malaysians, that is not a distant story. DuitNow and India's UPI are being wired together, which means the playbook taking shape in Mumbai is about to matter at the QR stand next to your nasi lemak.
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What India's payments chief actually said
Dilip Asbe, managing director and chief executive of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates UPI, told TechCrunch at Mumbai Tech Week that AI will sit at the centre of the network's next phase. He framed it around three jobs: bringing in the next wave of users, catching fraud, and extending credit to people and merchants who have a digital footprint but no formal credit history.
"AI will be used very effectively when we look at the next wave of UPI, and that includes all aspects, including reaching new users," Asbe said, per TechCrunch. "We must use AI effectively to protect our current citizens, to find fraud, and to find mules." He added that AI should also help route credit to small merchants, and that he expects it to help add the next half a billion users, working alongside the central bank and the government.
The scale he is describing is large. UPI clears over 750 million transactions on a normal day, and two apps, PhonePe and Google Pay, hold more than 80% of the market between them. India's regulator has a plan to cap any single app at 30% of volume, currently slated for the end of 2026, a reminder that concentration is a live worry even at that scale.
Why this lands in Malaysia, not just Mumbai
The link is concrete. In February 2026, PayNet, which runs DuitNow, signed an agreement with NPCI International to connect the two QR systems. The rollout comes in two stages: first, Indian travellers scan their UPI apps at DuitNow QR points across Malaysia, then Malaysians use DuitNow to pay at UPI codes in India. With more than three million DuitNow QR acceptance points already live and Visit Malaysia 2026 underway, that is a lot of new cross-border traffic flowing over the same rails Asbe wants to put AI on.
Malaysia is not a small player here. DuitNow QR transactions doubled to three billion in 2025, PayNet processed 8.44 billion digital payments for the year, and the average Malaysian made 538 e-payments, up about a quarter on 2024. The country sits second only to China on QR adoption. The infrastructure is in place. The open question is whether the intelligence running on top of it keeps up.
The part Malaysia cannot afford to ignore: fraud
Asbe put fraud and mules at the centre of his AI pitch, and that is exactly where Malaysia is bleeding. Malaysians lost roughly RM2.8 billion to scams in 2025, and mule accounts, the borrowed or sold bank accounts that move stolen money, are the connective tissue of almost every syndicate. Malaysia's National Fraud Portal can already trace stolen funds within 30 minutes and has lifted mule-account detection by about 14%, and the National Scam Response Centre now runs its 997 hotline around the clock. Those are real wins, but they are largely reactive. Asbe's argument is that the same AI used to onboard users should be hunting mules before the money moves, not after a victim calls.
Credit and concentration, the quieter lessons
Two other threads from Asbe travel well to Malaysia. The first is credit: using payment data to extend small, responsible loans to gig workers and micro-merchants who are invisible to traditional credit scoring. That is the same group Malaysian buy-now-pay-later providers and digital banks are chasing. The second is concentration. India is trying to legislate a 30% cap because two apps run its market. Malaysia should recognise the shape of that problem too, where a handful of e-wallets and DuitNow itself carry most of the volume.
India is treating AI as core payment infrastructure, not a feature. With DuitNow and UPI now joined at the QR code, Malaysia gets a rare preview of where this is heading. The smart move is to copy the fraud-fighting and credit playbook before the scammers copy the growth one.
Cover and in-article photos courtesy of SpotOn and Blake Wisz on Unsplash.