Introduction to UPI
UPI, or Unified Payments Interface, is India’s flagship digital payment system that allows instant money transfer between bank accounts through mobile apps. Whether it’s BHIM, Google Pay, Paytm, or PhonePe, UPI has made payments as simple as scanning a QR code or entering a UPI ID. Once linked to a bank account, users can send and receive money in real time, without the hassle of sharing account details or waiting for settlement delays.
Over time, UPI has become the backbone of India’s digital economy, processing billions of transactions every month across millions of merchants and consumers. Its popularity comes from three things: ease of use, speed, and security.
But behind this simplicity lies a significant technical challenge. Every UPI transaction must complete within seconds, and the application must:
- Stay available 24×7, 365 days; downtime means broken payments.
- Scale seamlessly as adoption grows.
As transaction volumes continue to surge, the underlying systems that power UPI must evolve to deliver uninterrupted availability and seamless scalability. This is exactly where Oracle Globally Distributed Database plays a critical role, providing the foundation to run UPI at national scale with resilience, performance, and consistency.
According to the SBI report cited recently in The Economic Times, the average daily UPI transaction value climbed from Rs. 75,743 Crore in January 2025 to Rs. 80,919 Crore in July 2025, then surged to Rs.90,446 Crore in August 2025, with daily transaction volumes rising to 675 million.
These numbers paint a clear picture: UPI isn’t just growing, it’s exploding. With such rapid expansion comes the need for database infrastructure that can handle not only today’s steadily increasing volumes but also tomorrow’s exponential growth. Not long ago, digital payments often required multiple verification steps and hours to settle. Today, even local street vendors process UPI payments instantly, often quicker than exchanging cash.
Scaling UPI: Requirements
UPI now processes billions of daily transactions, demanding real-time speed, scalability, and resilience. Each payment must confirm within 2–3 seconds, even as volumes spike 20× during peak events. The platform has to scale elastically to handle unpredictable surges without bottlenecks. Continuous availability is critical, outages disrupt millions of payments and damage trust. At the same time, fraud detection must run in real time across millions of transactions without slowing down. These factors make a highly scalable and distributed database infrastructure essential for UPI’s growth but keeping up with that scale introduces some key technical challenges such as:
1. Scalability at Peak Load
Thousands of concurrent sessions, very large transaction tables, and index contention require horizontal scaling and optimized indexing.
2. Low-Latency Performance
Consistently sub-second response times demand optimized I/O and minimal network delays across distributed nodes.
3. Resilience and High Availability
Continuous uptime with fast recovery and active-active architectures to keep payments running during failures or upgrades.
4. Geo-Distribution
Data must be partitioned and distributed across zones, regions, and clouds while maintaining ACID compliance and low-latency access.
Oracle Globally Distributed Database Architecture for UPI
UPI’s scale demands an infrastructure built for always-on availability, seamless scaling, and fault tolerance. Oracle Globally Distributed Database meets this “Never Down” requirement for UPI with deployment across multiple regions using Raft Replication. Its active-active application and data tier deployment across multi-region improves availability and survivability, keeping payments always online. Oracle Globally Distributed Database delivers this by:
- Automated Data Distribution & Online Scaling: As workload grows, the infrastructure grows with it and data is re-distributed automatically across shards, regions, and data centers, eliminating hotspots without application changes.
- Active-Active Multi-Region deployment with 0 RPO and Sub-Second RTO: Raft replication enables always-on databases with fast automatic failover with zero data loss (RPO = 0, RTO in sub-seconds).
- Oracle Globally Distributed Database also supports bi-directional replication, enabling reads and writes across multiple locations without conflict.
- High-Throughput, Low-Latency Processing: Optimized for both high-volume writes and sub-second reads, making it ideal for real-time payment confirmations and fraud detection.
- Resilience & Survivability: If a region goes offline, other regions continue seamlessly, with automatic failover and transparent traffic rerouting.
- Enterprise-Grade Security: Oracle offers a comprehensive suite to safeguard sensitive data across all layers of the database infrastructure, providing robust security for UPI payments while strengthening overall data protection.
Benefits for UPI with Oracle Globally Distributed Database
- Hyperscale Performance and Scalability: Supports millions of transactions per second with petabyte-scale data, and elastic growth with near-instant responses.
- Always-On Availability: Built-in Raft replication enables zero data loss automatic failover across data centers and regions.
- Data Consistency: Supports ACID-compliant distributed transactions across shards and regions without compromising performance.
- No Single Point of Failure: Built-in replication and automated routing across shards eliminates dependency on any single node or region.
- Regulatory Compliance: Automatically store country-specific data within mandated regions to help meet regulatory requirements while maintaining a unified, single view of a database.
- Multi-Model Workloads: Supports all modern data types, workloads, and development styles including relational, JSON, text, and vector data across both row and columnar storage formats, enabling OLTP and analytics in one database. Existing SQL applications transition with minimal rewrites.
- Petabyte-scale AI and analytics: Run long-duration AI and analytics workloads on real-time streaming data by horizontally scaling to ingest and process millions of records per second, for fraud detection and insights without disrupting payments.
- Operational Simplicity: Automated shard management, redistribution, and application-aware routing reduce operational overhead.
- Flexible Deployment: Runs on commodity servers, Exadata, or shards can span across on-premises, cloud, and multi-cloud environments.
- Strategic Cloud Partnerships: Deep integration with Microsoft, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Service offers cross-cloud flexibility and modernization.
Driving the Future of UPI
UPI has transformed payments in India, creating an ecosystem where billions of transactions flow every day with speed and reliability. To sustain this momentum, the underlying database infrastructure must evolve in step with rising volumes and user expectations. Oracle Globally Distributed Database brings together continuous availability, elastic scalability, and operational simplicity to support every payment is processed securely and without interruption. As adoption accelerates and transaction values surge, it provides the foundation for banks to keep UPI running at national scale, delivering the resilience and performance needed to support India’s digital economy well into the future.
If your bank is facing UPI scalability, performance, or availability challenges, connect with us to explore how Oracle Globally Distributed Database can help.
Resources:
Globally Distributed Database product page on oracle.com
Globally Distributed Database LiveLabs