The Central Government’s Department of Financial Services Secretary, M. Nagaraju, speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2025 on Tuesday, 7 October 2025, announced that the centre is set to roll out new updates to India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in an effort to strengthen verification and simplify payments.
The government plans to soon implement fingerprint verification, along with facial recognition, for UPI transactions to make digital payments simpler and more secure. This move aims to eliminate the need for people to manually enter their UPI PIN, making transactions PIN-free.
Key things you must know
1. Fingerprints or facial recognition: After the government update, the UPI users will be able to authenticate their transactions using their fingerprints or facial recognition through their mobile devices.
2. Pin-free: Financial Services Secretary of India, M. Nagaraju, also announced that this move will eliminate the need for entering your unique personal identification number (PIN).
3. Transaction limit: Even though users will be able to use their biometrics, like fingerprints or facial recognition, the transactions will be capped at a maximum of ₹5,000 per day, and the limit will be decided later by the regulator.
4. Reset PIN: The government will also enable users to use the Aadhaar-based facial authentication to ‘Set’ or ‘Reset’ their PIN using their individual UPI applications.
Currently, if a user wants to ‘Set’ or ‘Reset’ their PIN, they must create a UPI PIN by entering their debit card details or completing Aadhaar one-time password (OTP) verification.
5. Security factor: As the central government seeks to make UPI simpler, faster and more secure, every transaction using the additional authentication options (fingerprint and facial) will be verified by the issuing bank using robust cryptographic checks.
6. User consent: UPI regulator, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), also said that the UPI apps and banks providing the digital payment services will have to make sure that ‘fresh consent’ is acquired “after each device binding operation before allowing further transactions.”
This refers to the requirement of a fresh approval to enable the biometrics every time a device is changed by the UPI user.
7. Link between UPI PIN and Biometrics: The banks will be required to disable their biometric feature for all the UPI applications in case of any changes or UPI PIN reset made by the user.
Mint reported earlier that if no transactions occur within 90 days of such a change, then the customer will be marked as inactive and the UPI account will be reactivated only upon customer confirmation.
UPI transaction volumes in India
According to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), in September 2025, a total of 19.63 billion UPI transactions worth ₹24.9 trillion were processed.
Mint reported earlier that the volumes of UPI transactions were 1.9% lower on a month-on-month (MoM) basis, but increased by 31% on a year-on-year (YoY) basis. The report also showed how the total value of the UPI transactions stood at ₹24.85 trillion in August 2025.
This move to revamp the UPI framework comes after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the nation’s central bank, issued a draft framework that mandates two-factor authentication for all digital payments and encourages the use of authentication methods beyond SMS-based OTP verification.
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