In November 2019, Alphabet-owned Google wrote to the US Federal Reserve, urging the central bank to model its forthcoming instant payment system, FedNow, on India’s Unified Payments Interface, or UPI.
An open payment system encourages collaboration between technology and financial service providers, adding that India’s approach has yielded “amazing” results for banks, consumers and other players within the payments ecosystem.
In 2021, UPI processed around 39 billion transactions totaling US$940 billion, representing 31% of India’s GDP.
On cue, in August 2020, the National Payments Corporation of India, which operates UPI, launched NPCI International Payments, a subsidiary tasked with exporting NPCI’s homegrown offerings, such as UPI and the RuPay card network, to overseas markets.
Over the past two years, efforts by NPCI International Payments, or NIPL, to expand UPI’s reach into international markets have borne fruit.
On Monday, NIPL partnered with European payment processor Worldline to enable Indian travelers to pay through UPI at its point-of-sale machines across Europe.
The first target markets for the facility are Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland. It will be expanded as Worldline’s QR code-based mechanism rolls out in more European countries.
Similar collaborations were recently announced with UK payment solution provider PayXpert, UAE-based Neopay and France-based Lyra Network.
NIPL’s greatest success came when Nepal, earlier this year, became the first country outside of India to adopt India’s interoperable real-time digital payments model, empowering its person-to-person and merchant-to-person payment transactions.
Last year, Bhutan opted to use UPI-specified QR codes, while Malaysia’s Merchantrade Asia allowed remittances to India to be sent via UPI.
The central banks of India and Singapore had also announced plans to connect Singapore’s PayNow and UPI, which would allow users to make instant money transfers directly from one bank account to another between Singapore and India.
Last month, global payment infrastructure group TerraPay announced a partnership with NIPL to enable Indian customers and merchants with an active UPI ID to make cross-border payments with QR locations enabled by TerraPay worldwide.
NIPL’s partnerships are expected to reduce cross-border remittance fees, enable seamless cross-border merchant payments and enable Indian travelers to use domestic payment channels abroad.
India received US$87 billion in remittances in 2021.
While NPCI’s global deals have largely been done with private players to benefit Indian tourists, can India lead other countries to adopt UPI as a domestic payment solution?
Ranadurjay Talukdar, Partner and Payments Advisory Leader, EY India says: NPCI can explain the economic benefits of digital payments to other governments. “UPI benefits SMEs and financial sector stakeholders. UPI can help make existing digital payment systems interoperable.
The NPCI has clear selling points to convince other governments of the economic benefits of UPI. If India plays its cards right, it will have the necessary ingredients to create payment systems together with the participating nations.
