Credit Line on UPI: How India Bolted a Lending Rail Onto a Payments Network (opens in new tab)

Open any UPI app in India right now and pay for a coffee. There's a decent chance the money didn't come from your bank balance at all. For most of UPI's life, that wasn't possible. The whole system was built on one assumption: every payment debits a real, funded bank account in real time. No float, no credit, no "pay later." That assumption just broke, and almost nobody outside fintech engineering noticed. What Changed, Technically In September 2023, the RBI extended UPI so a pre-sanctioned c...