UPI payment services to expand overseas soon
25 Oct 2019
In a major boost to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments might soon be available while travelling abroad. UPI fund transfer system could soon be used in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.
These two countries have already opened to India's RuPay cards.
Both have a sizable population of Indian expatriates. The introduction of the UPI payments system could also be a big boost for Indians travelling to these countries.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) plans to roll out the feature in the next six months, starting with Singapore and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), reports citing sources said.
The expansion of UPI to Singapore and UAE comes after the Nandan Nilekani-led committee on digital payments suggested that NCPI should expand payment services like UPI, RuPay and BHIM to other countries as well.
UPI, which has over 141 banks on board right now, has emerged as a major payments alternative to debit, credit and e-wallets. In September alone, the UPI-based payment system recorded 955.02 million transactions worth over Rs1.61 lakh crore compared to 918.35 million transactions a month ago, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data showed.
On a year-on-year basis, UPI transactions have increased 2.3 times or 135 per cent.
In India, popular payments services like Google Pay, Paytm and PhonePe use the UPI facility.
The main challenge will be bringing overseas merchants onto the payments platform. NPCI will require the assistance of banks and merchant aggregators in the target countries to bring the merchants on board.
UPI is a payment interface of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an umbrella organisation for operating retail payments and settlement systems in India. It powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application, merging several banking features, seamless fund routing and merchant payments into one hood. It also caters to the 'Peer to Peer' collect request, which can be scheduled and paid as per requirement and convenience. UPI allows immediate money transfer through mobile device round the clock and can be used to pay utility bills, over the counter payments, and barcode (scan and pay) based payments.