FIVE REASONS WHY UPI HAS NOT DISRUPTED CREDIT CARD

Summary from the TLDR Fintech newsletter

India's UPI looked like a textbook Christensen disruptor (cheap, basic, and aimed at the low end), yet India's credit card business has tripled in five years. His five reasons: both can grow together in a fast-growing, under-digitized economy; UPI made digital payments visible to everyone, which drove demand for cards; UPI scams pushed some users back to cards for fraud protection; and banks earn nothing on UPI but 2 to 3% on cards, so they pushed cards hard. The fifth is that UPI was never designed to compete: it offers no rewards, no deferred payment, and no fraud protection, and the government treats it as a public good. That may start to shift on October 15, when merchant UPI payments above INR 2,000 begin carrying a 0.4% fee.