UPI Chalega | NPCI Case Study | ibs Fulcro
ibs Fulcro was NPCI's digital agency for UPI Chalega across a real, multi-year engagement from 2020 to 2023, running in parallel with Ogilvy India as mainline agency. The digital films, assets, and paid media went out into a market that would go on to make UPI the world's largest digital payments ecosystem.
At a glance
Client: National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) (Fintech & Digital Payments)
Problem: India needed a fast, trusted alternative to physical cash handling, accelerated by the pandemic, and required sustained national digital media to drive real, lasting UPI adoption.
Solution: ibs Fulcro served as NPCI's real digital agency for UPI Chalega across a genuine multi-year engagement (2020-2023), running in parallel with Ogilvy India as mainline agency.
Result: Unaided awareness of UPI as a payment method: 95%
ibs Fulcro's role: Digital Media
The Brief
NPCI needed a sustained, multi-year campaign to build trust in UPI as a safe, everyday way to pay, across a period, 2020 to 2023, when digital payment behavior in India was shifting fast, accelerated further by the pandemic's push away from physical cash handling.
ibs Fulcro was appointed as NPCI's digital agency for UPI Chalega across that full multi-year run, working in parallel with Ogilvy India, which held the mainline agency mandate. The brief covered the full digital execution: a campaign website, a slate of content and product films, and the paid media plan to get it in front of the country.
The Context
Much of the campaign's early digital work was shot and released into a genuinely locked-down India. Street-level footage from that period shows the texture of the moment directly: social distancing markings painted onto empty streets, masked pedestrians, hand-lettered “STAY HOME STAY SAFE” signage held up in public. The campaign's safety messaging wasn't abstract positioning, it was addressing the exact behavior change the moment demanded: move payments online, safely, without needing to touch cash or a card machine.
The campaign ran under the #PaySafeIndia and #ZimmedarRahoUPIKaro (“Stay responsible, use UPI”) hashtags, with an explicit tagline of driving responsible growth, positioning safe UPI usage as a civic behavior, not just a product feature.
What ibs Fulcro Delivered, as Digital Agency
| Deliverable | Detail |
|---|---|
| Campaign website | The digital hub for the UPI Chalega campaign, including “The ABC of UPI” educational content |
| Content films | A slate of narrative content films built around relatable, everyday household scenarios |
| 4 product films | Dedicated films demonstrating specific UPI product features and use cases |
| 5 slice-of-life films | Short-format films depicting UPI adoption within ordinary daily situations |
| Paid media plan | The paid distribution strategy that put the campaign's content in front of a national audience |
Source: UPI Chalega campaign results reel, ibs Fulcro's digital agency engagement, 2020–2023.
The Creative Approach
Rather than lead with a feature list, the content films used a recurring household format, a family navigating everyday moments, an older family member initially wary of digital payments, a payment completed successfully and safely on screen. One recurring film shows a UPI payment confirmed with an on-screen “Rs. 501 Received” notification, grounding the campaign's message in a specific, plausible, everyday transaction rather than an abstract claim about digital transformation.
The campaign also carried real third-party validation into its media mix: a quote-tweet from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's account reading, “This is the time to ensure Social Distancing. Digital Payments help you do that. Let's listen to these stalwarts and adopt digital payments,” tagged with #PaySafeIndia and NPCI's handle, folded directly into the campaign's paid and earned media.
Voices in the Campaign
The campaign combined institutional credibility with cultural reach. On the institutional side, it featured on-record participation from senior figures across the payments ecosystem, including Suresh Sethi (MD & CEO, NPCI), alongside representation from IRDAI, the Ministry of Electronics and IT, PhonePe, and Union Bank, positioning UPI adoption as an ecosystem-wide priority rather than a single company's marketing push.
On the cultural side, the campaign brought in recognizable faces, including Virat Kohli, Ranveer Singh, Rashmika Mandanna, and Shruti Haasan, to carry the safe-payments message to a mainstream national audience, alongside format-native creator content designed to feel native to social feeds rather than a straight advertisement.
What the results reel actually shows: the figures below describe UPI's overall market position following the awareness campaigns run under the UPI Chalega banner across its full 2020–2023 run, they are not claimed here as the result of any single year in isolation. We're presenting them as the real market outcome ibs Fulcro's digital work, running alongside Ogilvy India's mainline work, fed into over that multi-year engagement.
UPI's Market Position Following the Campaign Era
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Unaided awareness | 95% |
| Merchant usage | 83% |
| Net Promoter Score | 81% |
| Monthly transactions | 5 billion |
| Monthly transaction value | $1.1 trillion |
| Scale versus China's digital payments | 1.6x |
| Scale versus USA's digital payments | 21x |
Source: UPI Chalega campaign results reel, reflecting UPI's market position across the campaign's 2020–2023 run.
Why This Engagement Mattered
This wasn't a routine brand campaign. It was national financial-infrastructure messaging, delivered across a multi-year period when India needed a fast, trusted alternative to physical cash handling, with ibs Fulcro running digital in parallel with Ogilvy India's mainline work. The work had to hold up to institutional scrutiny (a government-backed payments body, senior regulators, bank executives) while still landing with an ordinary household audience being asked to trust a new way of paying.
Frequently asked questions
ibs Fulcro was NPCI's digital agency for UPI Chalega across a real, multi-year engagement from 2020 to 2023, running in parallel with Ogilvy India, which held the mainline agency mandate. ibs Fulcro was responsible for the campaign's digital films, website, digital assets, and paid media plan.
As digital agency, the scope covered the campaign website, including the ABC of UPI educational content, a slate of content films, 4 dedicated product films, 5 slice-of-life films, and the paid media plan that distributed this content nationally, across the campaign's 2020–2023 run.
The two agencies held distinct, parallel mandates across the same multi-year period: ibs Fulcro as NPCI's digital agency, and Ogilvy India as the mainline agency. Both were genuinely, concurrently involved in the campaign, not sequential agencies handing off to one another.
UPI reached 95% unaided awareness, 83% merchant usage, an 81% Net Promoter Score, 5 billion monthly transactions, and $1.1 trillion in monthly transaction value, becoming 21 times the USA's digital payment volume. These figures reflect UPI's overall market position across the campaign's full 2020–2023 run.
UPI Chalega was national financial-infrastructure messaging backed by a government payments body, senior regulators, and bank executives, not a typical product launch. The work had to satisfy institutional scrutiny while still convincing an everyday household audience to trust a new way of paying, sustained across multiple years, not a single burst campaign.