Mumbai, April 18, 2025 – State Bank of India (SBI), India’s largest bank, logged the highest UPI transaction failure rate in FY25, hitting a technical decline (TD) of 0.9% in March—worse than peers like Axis Bank at 0.03% and HDFC Bank at 0.02%, per a Hindu Business Line report (web:4). With 4.95 billion transactions that month, SBI’s glitches—server lags, maintenance woes—dragged the UPI ecosystem, which powers 83% of India’s digital payments (web:4,7).
SBI’s TD, where payments fail due to bank or NPCI server issues, spiked from 0.34% in February to 0.9%, impacting apps like Google Pay and Paytm, where SBI is a key payment service provider (web:4,5). “It’s a bottleneck—SBI’s scale hurts,” a fintech exec told Livemint (web:4). Axis Bank’s 0.03% TD, with 1.2 billion transactions, set the gold standard, while Bank of Baroda hit 0.03% (web:4). X users vented—“SBI’s UPI crashes my lunch!”—with Downdetector logging 2,000 complaints on April 12 (post:1, web:5).
The issue isn’t new—SBI’s 2024 TD averaged 0.7%, dwarfing private banks’ 0.1% (web:4). Three outages in March, blamed on high API calls and hardware glitches, hit 600 million daily transactions (web:4,7). “SBI’s servers can’t keep up,” an NPCI insider said (web:4). Smaller PSUs like Union Bank (0.2%) outperformed, but Jio Payments Bank’s 7.23% TD was worst (web:4). SBI’s 117 million digital users—64 million on mobile—face the brunt (web:21).
For India’s 90 crore UPI users, it’s a pain point—83% of digital transactions rely on UPI (RBI). NPCI’s push for sub-1% TD falters as volumes soar—18 billion in March (web:4,15). Bengaluru’s IT hub, where 15 lakh techies lean on UPI, feels the sting (NASSCOM). Will SBI upgrade, or keep stalling India’s cashless dream?
