Correct. The free payments are a utility offering as part of UPI, banks get to upsell other services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367855 ("UPI Payments: 10B transactions a month done, next stop 100B")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368398 (Related dang macro expansion from id=37367855)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368202 (>50% monthly global Visa transactions)

The article is poorly written to support a clickbait headline. I found it hard to follow.

From what I got from the article the McKinsey survey, this is the actual revenues from transactions fees including but not limited to UPI. Not the adjacent revenues.

> Even with a free public utility, India’s payment revenue swelled last year to $64 billion, behind only China, the U.S. and Brazil, and rivalling Japan, according to McKinsey & Co.’s latest global survey[0].

[0] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i...