The numbers are striking on their own terms. The US Federal Reserve's initial findings from its 2025 triennial payments study show that total noncash payments reached 236.6 billion in 2024 — more than triple the volume recorded at the turn of the century. Cards account for over three-quarters of payments by number. The ACH system, which processes bulk electronic transfers between bank accounts, claimed almost three-quarters of noncash payments by value for the first time. Checks and ATM withdrawals declined on both volume and value. A country that once defined itself by the personal cheque is now almost entirely cashless in its recorded financial flows.
But the detail that deserves particular attention — especially from payment strategists in Mumbai and New Delhi — is this: credit card payments grew faster than debit card payments in 2024 for the first time in almost a decade. This is a signal about which networks are consolidating power in the world's largest economy, and which public-infrastructure alternatives still face structural headwinds.
The Architecture Underneath the Numbers
To understand why this matters beyond the United States, read the Fed study as a map of infrastructure, not just behaviour. The ACH system's near-dominant share of payment value shows that high-value, recurring transfers — payroll, business-to-business settlements, government disbursements — have digitalised. The card network's dominance by transaction count shows that everyday consumer commerce still flows overwhelmingly through Visa and Mastercard rails. FedNow, the Fed's own real-time payment system launched in 2023, does not yet feature in these aggregate figures in a way that disrupts either pattern. Its adoption trajectory will be the central question the triennial study's fuller analysis must answer.
That question is not academic for India. NPCI International — the overseas arm of the National Payments Corporation of India — has publicly identified North America as a priority corridor for UPI's global expansion. Dilip Asbe, NPCI International's MD and CEO, has stated that this expansion is contingent on regulatory alignment with local payment authorities, including the Federal Reserve. The Fed study is therefore an intelligence document as much as a statistical release: it tells NPCI International whether the US market's real-time payment infrastructure has reached the adoption threshold that makes a UPI-FedNow interoperability bridge commercially viable.
Two Roads, One Corridor
India's payment diplomacy faces a structural choice. The US has two competing real-time payment rails: FedNow, operated by the Federal Reserve itself, and RTP, operated by The Clearing House — a private consortium owned by the largest commercial banks. If the Fed study's fuller data, expected as analysis continues, shows FedNow gaining meaningful share among community banks and credit unions, the case for a UPI-FedNow linkage strengthens. A public-to-public infrastructure bridge aligns naturally with India's model — UPI is itself a government-backed public utility — and carries fewer commercial complications than negotiating with a privately-owned consortium.
If, however, the study reinforces the dominance of Visa and Mastercard by transaction count while FedNow remains marginal, India's strategic position in the US market grows more complicated. The card networks are not neutral infrastructure; they extract interchange fees, set technical standards, and have historically resisted interoperability arrangements that threaten their moat. The credit card segment's renewed growth, the detail the Fed highlighted most sharply, is a Visa-Mastercard story. A remittance ecosystem built on card rails is an expensive one — expensive for the Indian families sending money home, and strategically uncomfortable for a country that has spent years arguing, including through its G20 presidency, that public payment infrastructure outperforms private network oligopolies.
Remittances and the Diaspora Arithmetic
Analysts who track India-US remittance flows note that the corridor has carried significant volumes annually, making it one of India's most important inbound remittance channels. The cost of those transfers is directly tied to the payment infrastructure through which they move. Wire transfers routed through correspondent banking networks are expensive. Card-based transfer services charge percentage fees that compound over millions of transactions. A UPI-linked real-time corridor — if technically and regulatorily feasible — would compress those costs substantially, channelling more of each dollar sent into the hands of receiving families rather than intermediary networks.
This is the concrete human stakes of what might otherwise look like an abstract central bank data release. The Fed study documents how American businesses and consumers choose to pay each other. But the infrastructure those choices flow through is the same infrastructure that shapes how an engineer in New Jersey sends money to her parents in Hyderabad. Shifts in US payment architecture are not domestic stories with international footnotes; they are foundational to the economics of one of the world's busiest remittance corridors.
India's G20 Leverage and Its Limits
India's most durable leverage in this space is multilateral rather than bilateral. The RBI's strategic objectives, as reflected in its annual reports, have consistently flagged cross-border payment interoperability as a priority, with G20 commitments cited as the legitimating framework. India's G20 presidency produced significant momentum around the FSB-CPMI roadmap for faster, cheaper cross-border payments — a framework that directly implicates Fed-regulated infrastructure in the United States.
Raghuram Rajan, the former RBI governor now at the University of Chicago, has written on the geopolitics of payment systems, arguing that India's UPI model represents a public-infrastructure alternative to card-network concentration — a framing that resonates in New Delhi as a description of what is at stake when the Fed releases data showing credit cards reasserting dominance. The Takshashila Institution's technology policy researchers have made a related point: US real-time payment infrastructure decisions tend to set de facto interoperability standards that smaller economies and Global South partners will eventually need to conform to. India, given its scale and its payment system's global reach, has an interest in shaping those standards early, through the G20 FSB process and bilateral central bank dialogue, rather than adapting to them after they calcify.
The RBI and the Ministry of External Affairs will need to coordinate here in ways that go beyond standard financial diplomacy. The Fed's triennial study is a once-in-three-years window into how American payment behaviour is evolving at an infrastructure level. India's representation in any Fed-convened stakeholder consultations that follow — on cross-border payment standards, on real-time rail interoperability, on the future architecture of ACH — is not guaranteed. It needs to be actively sought.
Reading the Signal Correctly
The Fed study's most important finding for India is not the headline number — 236.6 billion noncash payments — but the structural tension it reveals between a card-network-dominated consumer layer and an ACH-dominated value layer. UPI operates precisely in the space between those two layers: it handles consumer transactions at scale while moving value through bank-account infrastructure rather than card networks. If FedNow can occupy a similar structural position in the US over the coming years, UPI-FedNow interoperability becomes not just diplomatically desirable but architecturally natural.
Whether the Fed's fuller analysis — promised as more data is processed — confirms FedNow's trajectory will determine whether NPCI International should prioritise its US corridor strategy around the public rail or seek a more complex arrangement with private-network participants. For now, the initial findings position the US payments ecosystem as one in transition: more digital than ever, more concentrated in familiar networks, but with a public-infrastructure alternative whose adoption curve remains genuinely open. That open curve is where India's strategic bet must be placed, and the triennial study's final release will be the clearest measure yet of how much runway remains.
