Skip to Main Content
Talk Beginner Slide Deck: Creative Commons

How Open Source Powers Every UPI Transaction You Make

Proposal status is Rejected
Sumukh Bhandarkar
Sumukh Bhandarkar
Session Description

UPI feels magical: instant payments, 24×7, across banks, with reliability that rivals any global real-time payment network. But behind this magic is an ecosystem built heavily on open-source technologies, open standards, and vendor-neutral protocols. This talk takes a deep dive into how UPI works under the hood: distributed queues, API gateways, authentication rails, open cryptographic standards, switching systems, and reliability engineering.

We explore how banks and PSPs depend on OSS components such as Linux, Java, Postgres, Kafka, HSM libraries, OpenJDK crypto, Kubernetes, and more to process millions of transactions per second. We also look at how NCPI's open API specifications foster interoperability across apps like PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, and bank apps.

This is a behind-the-scenes journey into the world of digital payments in India, engineered using scalable, resilient open-source software.

Key Takeaways

  • Understand how UPI works technically : protocol flow, settlement, gateways, switching.

  • How major UPI components rely on FOSS

  • Performance & reliability patterns inspired by OSS systems.

  • Why openness and standardization enabled UPI’s explosive growth.

  • Lessons OSS-driven systems can apply from UPI’s success.

References

https://razorpay.com/blog/what-is-upi-and-how-it-works/

Session Categories

Engineering practice - productivity, debugging
Technology architecture
Community
Talk License: Slide Deck: Creative Commons

Speakers

Sumukh Bhandarkar
Sumukh Bhandarkar Sr Engineer | Target

Senior Software Engineer with extensive experience designing and building resilient, scalable backend systems. Skilled across Java, REST, GraphQL, microservices, event-driven architectures, containers, and distributed systems. Passionate about clean architecture, performance optimization, and solving real-world engineering challenges at scale.

A natural teacher with a strong desire to mentor, share knowledge, and contribute to the tech community through talks, workshops, and open-source collaboration.

At the end of the day?
Just yet another engineer, who loves what he does.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumukhbhandarkar