Making UPI easier to recognize and trust

Context & constraints

The Q3 2025 work focused on improving how Remitly customers send money to India with UPI. Customers had limited context for choosing UPI over bank deposit, and the recipient-name entry generated more than 9,000 errors each month.

Research found that 51% of customers wanted familiar payment-platform names or logos. Any new direction had to fit the existing send flow while making a newer-to-some-customers method feel recognizable.

Problem

Customers sending to India via UPI didn’t trust the payment method enough to use it, even though it’s fast and free. 63% said they’d feel more confident with real-time confirmation that a UPI ID is valid. The recipient account screen had a 10% error rate.

Solution

The redesign added recognizable UPI platform cues, supported recipient lookup and validation with a UPI ID or Indian mobile number, and showed the resolved recipient name before sending. UPI adoption rose 27% and the projected incremental annual impact was $2.6M.

My role

I led UX design for improvements to UPI merchandising and recipient information collection, working from the existing send flow and the error patterns in recipient setup.

Key decisions & trade-offs

I brought recognizable UPI platform cues into delivery-method selection, rather than relying on a generic explanation of what UPI is. For recipient setup, the proposed flow supported both a UPI ID and an Indian mobile number, with lookup and validation to confirm the recipient before sending.

Showing a resolved recipient name created a useful confirmation point, but also made the accuracy and clarity of that state especially important. The experience kept the customer in control by making the matched details visible before continuing.

UPI send flow merchandising screens showing the delivery-method options presented to customers. — The merchandising solution: how UPI was presented as a delivery-method option to customers.

UPI send flow screens showing delivery-method selection and recipient UPI ID entry. — Alternative treatments didn't perform in usability testing and couldn't scale for the future introduction of a payment identifier, the recipient's mobile number.

UPI send flow screens showing recipient lookup, validation, and resolved recipient confirmation. — This was the preferred treatment in usability testing, so it became the final design.

The proposed design scaled well with the recipient's mobile number as another payment identifier.

Outcomes

CUSTOMER IMPACT

63%

Of customers said real-time UPI ID validation would make them more confident, so we built it

10%

Error rate on the recipient account screen before the redesign

BUSINESS IMPACT

+27%

UPI adoption, a fast, free-to-send method that costs Remitly less to operate

$2.6M

Projected incremental annual impact (LTV + profit)