To purists and experts, the Indian Premier League may be more glamorous than cricket. However, it’s serious business for the country’s wealthiest tycoon – and an operational nightmare for banks.

According to Reuters, Mukesh Ambani is providing marketers brain-mapping studies of how spectators behave during an IPL play in order to maximize revenue from the billions of dollars his conglomerate has spent on streaming and broadcasting the country’s most popular sport.   Meanwhile, banks are conducting a different type of analysis: mapping the money flow. 

According to commentators, the two-month-long cricket tournament, including this year’s finals on May 25, is a major driver of yearly Indian gambling demand of more than $100 billion. Overseas online bookies provide residents with illicit access via cryptocurrencies. They also employ mule accounts within the local financial system.  The legitimate gaming sector, which pays domestic taxes and accepts rupee-denominated bank deposits, is smaller but developing rapidly.

One popular option is Dream11, a business that allows users to construct their own fantasy teams and compete against others. Prediction markets like Probo provide all-or-nothing binary options on a wide range of real outcomes.  People make real-money bets by withdrawing funds from their bank accounts and immediately crediting the betting site.

Related: Ranking Richest IPL Teams in 2025, Where Does CSK, MI, RCB Stand?

This frenetic activity puts a load on lenders’ IT teams.  To expedite in-match wagering, they must ensure that consumers’ funds reach the destination bank via India’s Unified Payments Interface, a public utility shared by over 600 institutions.  Clients put pressure on banks that handle reputable betting sites’ accounts to not miss out on any funds that come in.  Alternatively, they will move their business to another institution.

Welcome to the digital era.  Prior to the introduction of the common utility in 2016, Indian banks had plenty of time to record debits and credits in software that ran on servers on their premises. A check submitted to a separate institution in another location took several days to clear.  Transfers made with a smartphone are now immediate.  Banks are suddenly dealing with a data tsunami from intermediaries that do the majority of their computing in the cloud.

Because of the popularity of the UPI system, which processes $3 trillion per year, India accounts for half of all real-time transactions worldwide.  Every month, the National Payments Corp., which manages the shared utility, publishes each bank’s failure rate — both as a remitter and a beneficiary.  Customers understand where they should keep their money to avoid embarrassments.

The Reserve Bank of India, too, has become less tolerant of errors.  The regulator has begun to take a critical view of user access and data security provided by financial institutions’ digital activities.  As I stated last year, poor investment in technology has proven to be Indian banks’ banana peel.  To prevent falling behind, companies are turning to new-age analytics vendors such as VuNet Systems.

Even without the IPL betting rush, the workload is tremendous.  Every customer who walks into an electronics store, buys a TV, and decides to pay for it in installments initiates approximately 200 digital dialogues — via so-called application programming interfaces — between the parties involved in the sale, financing, and payments.

VuNet, which monitors over a billion transactions per day, collects 50 terabytes of data.  That’s like watching TikTok videos continually for four years.  “This information was once only accessible to technical teams and troubleshooters,” says Ashwin Ramachandran, CEO of the Bengaluru-based business.  No more.  “Today, our talks with banks increasingly include top management.  We employ big data and artificial intelligence to help executives obtain real-time awareness and prevent future failures — in plain English.

At some time, however, the elephant in the room will have to be addressed.  Unlike credit and debit cards, the majority of the 185 billion instantaneous transactions that occur each year generate little revenue for banks, whether customers are paying for an autorickshaw ride or betting on an IPL event.

The government wants to maintain the network free for users, therefore it provides incentives to intermediaries. Those aren’t enough.  Banks facing rapid inflows and withdrawals cannot afford to treat them as a low-priority activity.  They must make significant investments to combat money laundering and fraud while also improving users’ experiences with legitimate payments. 

The sword of digitization cuts both ways. Deposits made with little effort are readily lost – due to a lack of effort to keep them.  Similarly, the UPI network, which has seen regular service disruptions in recent weeks, will need to strengthen if it is to remain a public monopoly.

One unsuccessful IPL wager could be merely a transaction ID to tech support.  For the customer who wanted to bet on the Gujarat Titans to beat the Rajasthan Royals on Wednesday, his winning wager was ruined.