India To Expand UPI To 3 More Countries After Singapore’s PayNow

India recently integrated UPI with Singapore’s PayNow. After getting more international demands, UPI may also launch in UAE, Mauritius and Indonesia.

India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Singapore’s PayNow were integrated last week to enable real-time funds transfer between citizens of both countries. UPI may also be connected with three more countries – UAE, Mauritius as well as Indonesia.

Mehul Mistry, global head of strategy, digital financial services, and partnership at online payments startup Wibmo, told Mint that if Singapore launches rapid money transfers, countries like the UAE, Mauritius, and Indonesia are likely to follow suit.

The expansion of India’s top-notch UPI digital payment infrastructure, which will make it simpler for Indian users to perform business abroad, is something to be proud of, he said. In 2019, financial services company PayU purchased Webmu.

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A cross-border person-to-person (P2P) payment system has been introduced with Singapore as the first nation. The ability to conduct rapid and affordable financial transactions by just scanning QR codes is anticipated to be especially helpful to the Indian diaspora. 

Mehul praised the project and suggested that other nations wanting to use technology to improve cross-border trade will find inspiration in it.

Shaktikanta Das, governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, introduced the India-Singapore cross-border real-time payment system on February 21. (MAS). 

Prime Ministers Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore and Narendra Modi of India virtually attended the inaugural event.

According to a statement from Singapore’s Prime Minister’s Office, the PayNow-UPI connectivity “would offer cheaper, faster, and safer cross-border retail payments and remittances, for enterprises and individuals equally, directly across bank accounts or e-wallets.” 

Lee Hsien Loo, the prime minister of Singapore, expressed optimism that the “solid cooperation” would continue to produce cutting-edge technological advances.

According to a statement by MAS, the PayNow-UPI initiative is the first real-time payment systems interconnection in the world to utilize a robust cloud-based infrastructure that can handle future growth in the volume of transactions traffic.

In his monthly radio address on Sunday, Prime Minister Modi noted that the country’s UPI is attracting interest from many nations and that the bilateral deal with Singapore will improve ease of life through digitalization.

“At this time, citizens of Singapore and India transfer money from their mobile devices in the same manner as they do throughout their respective nations. I am delighted that people have started benefiting from it,” PM Modi stated in the most recent Mann ki Baat.

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