By Siddhi Nayak

Card payments in India are poised for steady growth as deeper financial inclusion, rising incomes and easier access encourage electronic transactions, according to analytics firm GlobalData. 

Debit cards remain dominant, but consumers are gradually leaning toward credit, attracted by benefits such as reward points, discounts, and instalment options, the London-based firm said in a report published Friday. It expects credit card usage to grow after integration with the Unified Payments Interface, the country’s home-grown real-time payment system.

India brought a much larger share of its population into formal financial services over the past decade, aided by wider bank-account ownership and inclusion initiatives like direct benefit transfers. That expansion has coincided with an exponential surge in digital transactions, especially low-value payments through UPI.