NPCI In Talks With 30 Countries For RuPay Cards, UPI Adoption

SUMMARY

The NIPL has approached foreign countries with the objective to assist them in building UPI like solutions through interoperable payment system: MoS Rajkumar Singh

UPI apps would enable use of RuPay cards by Indian travellers abroad for making purchases and for facilitating remittance to and from India with efficiency and speed: Govt

Bhutan, Singapore and the UAE currently accept both UPI and RuPay cards, while Nepal only accepts RuPay cards

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is currently in talks with 30 countries for the adoption of RuPay cards and Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Minister of State for External Affairs Rajkumar Singh informed the Parliament on Friday (July 29).

The NPCI has entrusted its arm, NPCI International Payments Limited (NPIL) with the task of ramping up the adoption of UPI and RuPay cards in foreign countries.

“NIPL has approached foreign countries with the objective to assist them in building UPI like solutions and transforming their digital payments landscape through (an) interoperable payment system,” Singh said in reply to a question.

He said that the greater adoption of UPI apps would “enable use of RuPay cards by Indian travellers abroad for making purchases and for facilitating remittance to and from India with efficiency and speed”.

The minister also reiterated that countries such as Bhutan, Singapore and the UAE currently accept both UPI and RuPay cards, while Nepal only accepts the home-grown card network.

While answering a similar question in the Parliament on July 28, Minister of State (MoS) for Finance Bhagwat Karad said that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is exploring multiple engagement models with other countries to spur the adoption of these services.

In a bid to increase adoption, he said the RBI is looking at collaborations between central banks, network to network engagement as well as agreements between the network and respective central bank or government agency.

Digital Payments Push

UPI is the government’s crown jewel for promoting its ‘Digital India’ initiative. The government-backed digital payments interface recorded more than 5.86 Bn transactions worth INR 10.14 Lakh Cr in June 2022.

With 330 banks and an average ticket size of INR 1,730 per transaction, UPI is currently the most popular digital payments system in India.

In addition to Bhutan, Singapore and UAE, France has also jumped onto the UPI bandwagon. Earlier last month, the NIPL signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with France’s Lyra Network to enable acceptance of UPI and RuPay Cards in the country.

Apart from that, the NPIL has also inked various pacts with several institutions in Japan and China.

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