CARD91 Launches Production-Ready UPI Issuance Platform
CARD91, a leading fintech infrastructure company, announced on June 26 that it has gone live with its UPI Issuance platform. The platform is now production-ready, positioning CARD91 as a critical backbone for India's digital payment ecosystem. It enables banks, payment service providers (PSPs), fintechs, prepaid payment instruments (PPIs), and enterprise platforms to build and scale UPI-led payment experiences.
Addressing Integration Barriers in the UPI Ecosystem
While UPI adoption has grown exponentially—processing over 8.2 billion transactions annually with 48% year-over-year growth—technical complexity and integration risks have remained barriers for many players. CARD91's platform offers a unified infrastructure layer that abstracts complexities of UPI switching, settlement, compliance, and merchant onboarding. This allows institutions to accelerate time to market and reduce operational overheads.
According to Ajay Pandey, CEO and Founder of CARD91, "Every regulated entity that wishes to offer UPI or systematically verify MCC before onboarding a merchant now has access to a trusted, production-ready backbone with significantly faster market reach."
End-to-End UPI Lifecycle Coverage
CARD91's platform provides comprehensive support across the entire UPI lifecycle. On the issuance side, it handles UPI transaction processing, funding account linkage, banking system integration, and UPI product lifecycle enablement. On the acquiring side, it enables AI-led merchant onboarding with MCC classification, Virtual Payment Address (VPA) creation and management, store and staff management, collections monitoring, refunds, settlements, mandate management, and comprehensive reporting.
The platform supports UPI over CASA, UPI over credit, and UPI over PPI use cases, all powered by enterprise-grade security aligned with NPCI guidelines, RBI regulations, and industry standards.
Impact on Regional Banks and Emerging Fintechs
Regional banks, emerging fintechs, and enterprise platforms have been particularly affected by integration challenges. CARD91's platform directly addresses this bottleneck by providing reliable and scalable infrastructure. India's UPI ecosystem is processing transactions at an unprecedented scale, with 8.2+ billion transactions annually and 48% year-over-year growth, yet many institutions still face barriers due to technical complexity.
Pandey added, "India's digital payment ambitions are no longer limited by technical complexity. They are limited only by imagination."
About CARD91
CARD91 is a payments and onboarding risk infrastructure provider that enables regulated entities to launch and scale customer programs. Built on a modular, scalable, flexible, and compliance-first architecture, the platform supports seamless onboarding journeys, fraud detection, credit decisioning, card issuance across credit, prepaid, and forex programs, and UPI infrastructure capabilities across issuance and acquiring.
Founded by a team of bankers and technologists, and proudly Made in India, CARD91 operates across key financial hubs including Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, and Chennai.
