 "MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli in action during Chennai Super Kings' match against Royal Challengers Bengaluru at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. Image: PTI")
The Indian Premier League (IPL) is the biggest T20 cricket carnival in the world. When the IPL is on, everything else in India takes a backseat. From hotels and airlines to restaurants and streaming platforms, every industry joins in. But not everyone is having a great time, especially not the Indian banks.
What is giving bankers a headache is the gambling that takes place during the IPL season.
Why are Indian bankers under pressure?
While cricket fans are watching sixes and wickets, banks are busy watching something else, the money trails. The IPL has become a major trigger for betting activities in India, a market reportedly worth over $100 billion.
And it’s not just Indian fans placing bets. The entire cricket-loving world gets involved through international online betting sites. Many of these platforms operate through cryptocurrency, making it harder to trace where the money is going.
Even though legal betting is still not very common, the illegal betting scene is massive in India. Recently, India’s CBI (Crime Bureau of Investigation) arrested 14 bookies in states like Chhattisgarh, Assam, and West Bengal. But that’s only a small part of the bigger picture.
UPI makes betting easier than ever
One of the biggest reasons betting has become so widespread during IPL in the recent past is because of the UPI (Unified Payments Interface), India’s popular instant payment system. UPI lets anyone transfer money with just one tap, and it’s super fast, which is making the job of the punters easy.
People can now place bets with as little as $1 or as much as $1 million instantly. UPI already handles over $3 trillion worth of transactions every year. But during IPL, this number reportedly goes even higher, and that’s where the problem begins.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsUPI servers can’t handle the IPL madness
Banks have been struggling with outages because of the sudden rise in UPI transactions during the ongoing IPL 2025 season. There were at least two major outages in the last 20 days. One of them happened during a match between Gujarat Titans (GT) and Rajasthan Royals (RR), the same game GT ended up winning by 58 runs. The UPI was down for 95 minutes during the game.
It will be interesting to see how the banks handle the huge number of fast payments during the IPL without crashing or slowing down.