UPI Biometric Payments Surge Past 600 Million Transactions in June

• On-device biometric authentication also supports RuPay Credit Card on UPI transactions, delivering a faster, secure and seamless payment experience.

UPI on-device biometric authentication-based payments accounted for over 611 million transactions in June 2026, with a total transaction value of ₹25,416 crore, reflecting strong adoption across everyday payment use cases. The feature enables users to authorise UPI payments using smartphone’s fingerprint or facial recognition.

UPI users are increasingly adopting biometric-based authentication for everyday payments, marking a significant shift towards faster, simpler and more intuitive digital payment experiences. The feature supports both Person-to-Person (P2P) and Person-to-Merchant (P2M) payments, making routine payments quicker and more seamless for users.

Biometric authentication is also available for RuPay Credit Card on UPI transactions, enabling PIN-free credit payments through UPI, extending the same speed and convenience to credit transactions as it does for savings account payments.

Sohini Rajola, Executive Director - Growth, NPCI, said, “The growing adoption of biometric authentication reflects the increasing preference among UPI users for payment experiences that are simple and efficient. With over 600 million transactions in June, the solution is seeing strong acceptance across use cases, including RuPay Credit Card on UPI. Several banks and UPI apps already offer biometric authentication to their customers, and we expect adoption to grow further as more users choose this secure and convenient way to make payments.”

By using on-device fingerprint or facial recognition, biometric authentication reduces dependence on UPI PINs, enables faster transaction completion and improves success rates.

With ecosystem enablement expanding across banks and UPI apps, biometric authentication is set to play a growing role in how Indians pay every day. NPCI expects the feature to see continued adoption in the months ahead, further strengthening UPI's position at the forefront of secure, frictionless digital payments.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is the umbrella entity responsible for operating retail payments and settlement systems in India. It is established by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA). The Company is focused on bringing innovations in the retail payment systems by using technology for achieving greater efficiency in operations and widening the reach of payment systems. NPCI is committed to harnessing the transformative potential of deep tech, creating an ecosystem that fosters collaboration to work on breakthrough technologies. Underlining its commitment to service, NPCI has been incorporated as a “Not for Profit” Company to provide infrastructure to the entire Banking system in India for physical as well as electronic payment and settlement systems.

NPCI has made a profound impact on India's retail payment landscape, focusing on creating robust, efficient, and inclusive payment and settlement solutions. NPCI has been instrumental in introducing a range of products that have revolutionised retail payment systems. These include Unified Payments Interface (UPI), RuPay, National Automated Clearing House (NACH), Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC), Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AePS), e-RUPI and more. Each of these products has contributed significantly to enhance the efficiency and accessibility of payment systems in India, ultimately propelling financial inclusion.

NPCI has played a fundamental role in establishing the foundation for India’s rapidly growing digital payments ecosystem, projecting the country onto the global stage.

NPCI has three wholly owned subsidiaries – NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) and NPCI Bharat BillPay Limited (NBBL) and NPCI BHIM Services Limited (NBSL), established in pursuance of NPCI Board & RBI approval.

For more information visit: https://www.npci.org.in/

Denied by a Machine: Court Overrules Biometric Glitch Blocking Candidate’s Job

Biometric Verification Isn't Infallible: MP High Court Upholds Human Rights Over Tech Errors

The Madhya Pradesh High Court recently ruled that a person's legal and fundamental rights cannot be denied due to biometric verification failure. Justice Subodh Abhyankar emphasized that a machine's inability to recognize someone shouldn't override their identity or rightful claims.

The case involved Vinod Kumar Meena, whose job application at Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) was rejected after biometric mismatches during onboarding. Meena had successfully cleared the examination, and his biometrics were verified during entry by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). However, a mismatch occurred during exit verification. Despite being shortlisted, his biometric verification failed again during document verification, leading to his rejection.

The court observed that while biometric verification is essential for ensuring a fair selection process, it is not always reliable. Justice Abhyankar stated that procedure should serve justice, not dominate it, and ruled that a person's identity should not be determined solely by a machine. Instead, identity verification should be conducted using official documents like Aadhaar Card, PAN Card, driving license, and passport.

LIC was directed to verify Meena’s identity through his documents and issue his appointment letter within four weeks.

This ruling sets a significant precedent in cases where technical failures impact fundamental rights.

Similar case involving biometric technology was observed in the United Kingdom in a case involving the UK Home Office, where a biometric mismatch led to the wrongful denial of a visa application. The court ruled that biometric errors should not be the sole basis for rejecting an applicant and ordered a review using alternative identity verification methods.

In United States, a federal court ruled against a state agency that denied unemployment benefits due to facial recognition failures. The court emphasized that biometric systems are prone to errors and cannot override documentary evidence proving identity.

Mastercard Selects India for Debuting Its New Payment Service That Uses Biometrics

Mastercard has chosen India for the global launch of its Payment Passkey Service. This innovative service aims to enhance online shopping security by using biometric authentication methods such as fingerprints and facial recognition, replacing traditional passwords and one-time passwords (OTPs).

The service was unveiled at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai and is being piloted with major Indian payment players like Juspay, Razorpay, and PayU, as well as online merchants such as bigbasket and banks like Axis Bank. This move is expected to significantly reduce online fraud, which has surged by nearly 300% in India over the past two years.

It is to be noted that despite the rising popularity of one-time passwords (OTPs) due to their ease of use, they are increasingly vulnerable to online scams such as phishing, SIM swapping and message interception. In India, the incidence of fraud cases has surged by nearly 300% in the last two years, as reported by the Reserve Bank of India’s Annual Report for 2023-2024.

By leveraging tokenization and biometric authentication, Mastercard's Payment Passkey Service aims to make online transactions faster and more secure, providing a seamless checkout experience for millions of shoppers.

The Mastercard Payment Passkey Service uses tokenization to secure a consumer’s payment details and biometric data, ensuring that no data is shared with third parties and is useless to fraudsters and scammers. The service is a game changer for online checkout:

1. Shoppers choose their Mastercard when checking out as a guest or select a card already stored securely on file with a merchant.

2. To confirm the payment, users can use biometric authentication mechanism features on their device – whether it’s a fingerprint, face scan or PIN.

3. Upon successful authentication, the payment is instantly completed.

Other countries are also adopting biometric authentication technologies for online transactions and digital identity systems.

Singapore’s SingPass system is one of the most advanced digital ID systems globally, allowing citizens to access over 700 government and private sector services using biometric authentication.

Similarily, Estonia’s eID system is renowned for its security and efficiency, offering over 600 e-services to citizens and 2400 to businesses. It uses biometric data to ensure secure access.

"We are excited to be partnering with Mastercard to pilot its Payment Passkey Service as an alternate transaction authentication method and provide our customers a non-OTP-based solution for transaction management,” said Sanjeev Moghe, president and head, Cards & Payments, at Axis Bank. “This will allow us to provide more engaging usage and in-app experience for customers who desire enhanced security and frictionless payments.”

“Enabling this industry-first proof of concept underscores Juspay’s commitment to empower merchants with innovation and technology that improves the e-commerce experience,” said Sheetal Lalwani, chief operating officer and co-founder of Juspay. “We believe this solution will help our merchant customers improve payment success rates and overall sales. With this pilot, merchants can significantly improve the payment experience for end consumers, allowing them to make payments easily, without multiple redirects, in a safe and secure way using device biometrics. We are working with Mastercard in shaping a future where digital payments are seamless and accessible to all, enabling merchants to better serve their customers.”

"As the country’s payment ecosystem matures, the demand for advanced and secure payment solutions is greater than ever,” said Manas Mishra, PayU’s chief product officer. “At PayU, we are relentlessly focused on pushing the boundaries of payment security and user experience as a resiliently progressive payments platform. Integrating the Mastercard Payment Passkey Service is a pivotal step in that direction. This partnership reflects our commitment to embracing cutting-edge payment technologies and reinforces our role in setting new benchmarks for security and efficiency in digital transactions."

"We are thrilled to join forces with Mastercard to introduce its Payment Passkey Service in India, a groundbreaking initiative that enhances transaction security and user experience in remote commerce, leveraging the power of biometric authentication,” said Arif Khan, chief innovation officer of Razorpay. “At Razorpay, our focus is on the 3 's's — safety, simplification and success rate — to ensure seamless and secure online payments. We strive to stay ahead of the curve by integrating advanced technologies that not only safeguard our merchants and their customers but also streamline the payment process."

UIDAI - IIT Bombay Partner to Develop Touchless Biometric Capture System

Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has joined hands with Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-Bombay) to develop a robust touchless biometric capture system for easier usage by people anytime, anywhere.

As part of the memorandum of understanding, UIDAI and IIT Bombay will carry out joint research to build a mobile capture system for fingerprints along with liveness model integrated with the capture system.

UIDAI is statuary body that issue Unique Identification numbers (UID), named as "Aadhaar", to all residents of India, and Aadhaar is termed as most sophisticated & world's largest biometric ID system. 

Under the partnership with IIT Bombay, the touchless biometric capture system, once developed and operational, will allow fingerprint authentication from home alike face authentication. The new system is expected to capture multiple fingerprints at one go and aid authentication success rate further. The new system once in place will be an addition to the existing facilities available in the Aadhaar ecosystem.

Such a system will use an intelligent combination of signal/image processing and machine learning/deep learning with a common mobile phone available to most citizens with a good user experience. This will be a step forward in making Universal authenticator a reality.

The collaboration between UIDAI and IIT Bombay through its National Centre of Excellence in Technology for Internal Security (NCETIS) will lead to joint engagement in research and development (R&D) for development of a system for UIDAI.

Aimed at developing indigenous technology solutions for Internal Security forces in broad areas Electronic System Design and Manufacturing, the NCETIS is a joint initiative by IIT Bombay and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), under its flagship Digital India Programme.

Last year in December, The joint efforts of several entities including NCETIS and Pune based SrivisifAl Technologies for developing an AI-based Video Analytics Solution had won the 25th National E-Governance Gold Award in Outstanding Research on Citizen-Centric services by Academic/Research Institutions. The project was led by IIT Bombay professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan. 

SPECTRUM Digitizers and AWGs now support NVIDIA ClaraT

NVIDIA-Clara rear

Spectrum Instrumentation now offers driver support for the NVIDIA Clara AGX™, a universal computing architecture for the next generation of AI medical instruments. The new drivers enable scientists and developers to choose from 64 different Spectrum Digitizers, Arbitrary Waveform Generators (AWGs) and Digital I/O cards, letting the NVIDIA Clara AGX kit perform high-speed electronic signal acquisition and generation for analog and digital signals. With the big variety of cards to choose from, users can exactly match their electronic signal requirements.

For example, the digitizer cards can be used to acquire signals in the DC to GHz frequency ranges by sampling them at rates from 5 MS/s up to a maximum of 5 GS/s. Similarly, the AWG cards can be used to produce signals with almost any wave shape and frequency content, from DC to 400 MHz, by outputting samples at speeds from 40 MS/s up to 1.25 GS/s. Individual analog cards offer one, two, four or eight channel capability. Digital I/O cards and Digital Data Acquisition cards allow the acquisition of digital data at rates up to 720 MS/s and can generate digital patterns at up to 125 MS/s. There are different interface options for TTL and LVDS available.

The NVIDIA Clara AGX developer kit provides an easy-to-use platform for developing software-defined, AI-enabled, real-time, point-of-care medical devices. It delivers real-time streaming connectivity and AI inference by combining the flexibility of the NVIDIA® Jetson AGX Xavier™ embedded Arm® system on a chip (SoC), the performance of the integrated NVIDIA RTX™ 6000 GPU, and the 100 GbE connectivity of the NVIDIA ConnectX® SmartNIC, Clara AGX. The kit also includes full-stack GPU-accelerated libraries, SDKs, and reference applications for developers, data scientists, and researchers to create real-time, secure, and scalable solutions.

Adding a Spectrum card to the Clara system allows sensor signals to be acquired, generated, stored and processed. Data can be streamed between the cards, the processor and the GPU. In fact, the high-speed parallel processing capabilities of the GPU make it the perfect platform for handling the large volumes of data that can be acquired and generated by the Spectrum products. Spectrum already offers SCAPP (Spectrum's CUDA Access for Parallel Processing) to make GPU-based data processing easily achievable, even at the fastest streaming rates.

M4i.6631-x8

 
Looking at some examples: One or two cards of the M2p-series (5 MS/s to 125 MS/s) can be installed into the kit, as in Pic 2. The AWG signal generator card with 4 channels and the digitizer with 8 channels are running fully synchronized at a speed of 125 MS/s on all channels. Choosing one card of the ultra-fast M4i-series, such as the popular M4i.6631-x8 in Pic 3, turns the kit into an extremely low-noise AWG with signal generation up to 1.25 GS/s output speed on two channels. Another example uses the M4i.2212-x8 digitizer card that is already a core part of the world's first, high-throughput cell sorter created by the University of Tokyo in 2019. It allows signal acquisition up to 1.25 GS/s on four channels, with up to 3.4 GBytes per second streaming and high-speed processing via Spectrums SCAPP drivers and the internal NVIDIA RTX 6000 GPU of the Clara kit.

The NVIDIA Clara is already being used in a number of biomedical research programs and next generation of medical devices. Applications include imaging, genomics, patient monitoring, and drug discovery. It can be found everywhere the healthcare industry is innovating and accelerating the journey to precision medicine. Now, by installing a Spectrum card, or cards, this powerful platform has an easy way to acquire and generate the fast electronic sensor signals that are often found in this cutting-edge field.

Oliver Rovini, Chief Technical Officer at Spectrum, said: "We were delighted to be approached by NVIDIA, and partner with them to develop drivers for their NVIDIA Clara platform. Spectrum already has many customers using our technology in medical science. Now, together with the NVIDIA Clara, they have an easy way to create very small, low power systems, that offer some of the most advanced data processing tools available today."

Like all products by Spectrum Instrumentation, the 64 different M2p- and M4i-series cards carry a 5-year product warranty, with free software and firmware updates, as well as customer support directly from the engineering team, for the whole lifetime of the product. For more information, please visit:

www.spectrum-instrumentation.com

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

IDEMIA Showcases Industry-Leading Biometric Algorithm at DHS 2020 Biometric Technology Rally

IDEMIA, the global leader in Augmented Identity, today announced a top tier finish during the 2020 Biometric Technology Rally, hosted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T). The event tested how accurately algorithms could match images of subjects wearing face masks and IDEMIA’s algorithm garnered a True Identification Rate (TIR) of over 90%.

 

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210322005392/en/

 

(Photo: Business Wire)

In the face of the pandemic, the 2020 Biometric Technology Rally challenged the biometric industry to bring forward new algorithms that could correctly identify individuals while wearing face masks. During the rally, acquisition systems collected biometric images from a demographically diverse set of volunteers. The images were then processed by matching systems, which consisted of software systems driven by biometric algorithms. Notably, this Rally was specifically designed to see how these systems would hold up in real-life applications, including at airports or ports of entry.

 

IDEMIA’s algorithm, along with three others, surpassed the Rally goal of a 99% TIR when identifying someone without a mask on. When the Rally switched to matching volunteers with a mask, IDEMIA’s algorithm received over a 90% TIR, placing it as one of the top five algorithms during the rally.

 

"The strong performance of IDEMIA’s matching algorithm at the Biometric Technology Rally is a testament to IDEMIA’s 40+ years of leadership in the industry and our commitment to developing the best available solutions for public security, civil identity and border control challenges," said Lisa Sullivan, Vice President of Transportation at IDEMIA. "The 2020 Rally was truly an exciting event as we worked alongside other industry leaders to help enable a seamless identification process, even while individuals are wearing masks."

 

As the world continues to grapple with the pandemic, it is imperative that DHS is able to provide travelers with low-touch options when moving through high traveled areas. Additionally, with President Biden’s recent policy changes around mask wearing, it will be vital for biometric algorithms to meet the rising need for contactless solutions. The 2020 Biometric Technology Rally and IDEMIA’s algorithm shows the industry has made great strides in turning contactless solutions into reality – even with masks.

 

About IDEMIA

 

IDEMIA, the global leader in Augmented Identity, provides a trusted environment enabling citizens and consumers alike to perform their daily critical activities (such as pay, connect and travel), in the physical as well as digital space.

 

Securing our identity has become mission critical in the world we live in today. By standing for Augmented Identity, an identity that ensures privacy and trust and guarantees secure, authenticated and verifiable transactions, we reinvent the way we think, produce, use and protect one of our greatest assets – our identity – whether for individuals or for objects, whenever and wherever security matters. We provide Augmented Identity for international clients from Financial, Telecom, Identity, Public Security and IoT sectors. With close to 15,000 employees around the world, IDEMIA serves clients in 180 countries.

 

For further information, go to www.idemia.com and follow @IdemiaGroup on Twitter.

 

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210322005392/en/