The Untold Story Of Dilip Asbe & His Team: Who Are The Brains Behind UPI Revolution?

Seven years ago, in the year of demonetization, i.e., 2016, India¡¯s banking and financial industry saw the beginning of a revolution¡ªUPI.

"Whatsapp Moment For Banking Industry"

In what was hailed as a ¡®WhatsApp moment for Indian banking¡¯ by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) platform of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) went live on August 25th, 2016. It allowed people to transfer funds in an instant, using virtual payment addresses.

And since then, there¡¯s been no stopping UPI, not just in India but even across countries. Even as recently as August, the number of UPI transactions hit an all-time high of 10 billion, with the NPCI further launching four new UPI features to boost this number to 100 billion per month.

The Brain Behind UPI-Dilip Asbe

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Also Read: Anand Mahindra's Tweet On Launch Of India's First UPI ATM

While it's a no-brainer that UPI has indeed been a revolution, few people are aware of the team behind UPI¡¯s creation.

Firstly, Dilip Asbe, the man at the heart of UPI¡¯s creation, was the chief operating officer at NCPI in 2016. At present, he is the interim MD and CEO of UPI maker NPCI. Prior to this, he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the organisation. He has played a pivotal role in designing, building, operationalizing, and managing large-scale innovative payment processing platforms like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM), Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), and India¡¯s homegrown card network, RuPay.

Earlier this year, in May, Dilip Asbe was conferred the award for Outstanding Contribution to Brand India at the 18th edition of the India Business Leadership Awards (IBLA).

Asbe holds a master of science (MSc) degree in management from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He completed his bachelor of engineering (BE) from Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering in Mumbai.

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Also Read: ICICI Bank Becomes India's First Lender To Introduce EMIs On UPI

Dilip Asbe's Team That Built UPI

Besides Dilip Abse, his team has been equally involved in building UPI. First is Sateesh Palagiri, the chief of mobility solutions at NPCI. The electrical & electronics engineer joined NPCI 13 years ago and has been closely involved in the development of what is perhaps the greatest revolution in payments in independent India¨Cthe UPI.

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"NPCI¡¯s big accomplishment was to keep UPI costs down and engineer the system for reliability and scalability. It recognised that building a platform for over 1 billion citizens with commercial software would be prohibitively expensive. So it decided to use open-source technologies and commodity hardware. "Today we use open source tech like Java, TDB, and Cassandra," he had said this year, as per the TOI report.

Next in the team has been Antony Prakash, chief information security officer, who says they are also constantly looking across the world to see which are the latest open source technologies they can use.

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Also Read: Explained: How RBIs Digital Rupee (e?) Is Different From UPI

Simultaneously, the entire technology architecture of UPI was built on the principles of reliability and scalability, says Saiprasad Nabar, chief of online product operations and technology at NPCI. Using commodity hardware meant that adding new server boxes was not an issue. UPI¡¯s data centre infrastructure¡ªspread across two locations now and a third in the works¡ªis totally dedicated to it.

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¡°We are on-premise, we don¡¯t even have private cloud, we horizontally scale the physical infrastructure so that it does not affect any other (NPCI) product. And we always build capacity that is 3x to 5x the current (average) transactions,¡± Antony Prakash had said.

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Nabar said they also built the system assuming that some things would fail, and therefore they needed to find ways for the application to handle that. Transactions go to two different servers for processing in case one is down or slow. "And if a commodity server is not reachable, the load balancer checks it and automatically sends the traffic to other servers," Nabar says.

Given the exponential growth of volume, Nabar says that every day they would review the architecture and improve it. They also worked with the entire ecosystem, including the banks, to ensure those systems were similarly fail-safe.

In-house engineers The use of open source technology meant NPCI needed a technology team that was well versed in these technologies, as per the TOI report.

On the other hand, Palagiri says it also requires engineers who can constantly adapt to new technologies. "And if you find an issue somewhere, you must be able to identify it, and if you cannot, you should be able to talk to the open source community, get the solution, and implement it," he says. And that¡¯s exactly the kind of team that NPCI built. At the time of conceptualising and designing UPI, Palagiri says, they also had support from people like Pramod Verma and Sanjay Jain, both of whom were closely involved in building Aadhaar.

Also Read; How A New UPI Feature Is Giving Headache To Google Pay PhonePe

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