How Open Source Powers Every UPI Transaction You Make
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.
Session Categories
Speakers
Sumukh Bhandarkar
Reviews
For conferences, we prefer for the speaker to have hands on experience with what they are showcasing. This is an interesting but unless the author has worked on UPI or has done significant research on the protocol (I don't see any personal blog posts in references), it is difficult to approve this.
UPI is built on FOSS and yet is not FOSS. I don't believe in glorifying closed source systems which use FOSS.