Invisible Giant
44 banks in 2016. 703 today.
The Global South does not just adopt infrastructure. It writes the standard the rest of the world copies.
On 11 April 2016, a press release announced a payments pilot with 44 banks. Almost nobody read it.
Ten years on, India's UPI connects 703 banks and carries close to half of the world's real-time payment volume, built not as a company but as public infrastructure any bank or app can plug into.
The decision that mattered: make the rail a public good, not a private moat.
The Global South does not just adopt infrastructure. It writes the standard the rest of the world copies.
Source: NPCI; PIB, 2026; IMF, 2025.