UPI Set To Enter Europe As RBI, NIPL Move to Link With ECB’s TIPS

Adding on to its bid to make UPI a global phenomenon, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced that India’s digital payment option is soon to enter Europe. 

The RBI and NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL) have entered the “realisation phase” of linking UPI with the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) system run by the European Central Bank.

Once live, the UPI–TIPS link will allow users in India and the Euro Area to send and receive money across borders in real time. The RBI said the effort is part of wider G20 goals to make cross-border payments cheaper and faster.

Both RBI and NIPL will now work with the ECB on technical integration, settlement flows and risk controls before the system is opened to users.

The news comes after India’s first attempt to take UPI to Europe back in 2022. At the time, NIPL partnered with France-based Worldline to enable European merchants to accept UPI and RuPay at their PoS terminals. 

At the time, Worldline rolled out QR-based UPI and RuPay acceptance across BENELUX and Switzerland, becoming the first European company to support the Indian payment systems.

The tie-up targeted the growing number of Indian travellers. However, that phase was limited to merchant acceptance. It did not create a direct money-movement corridor between India and Europe.

The new UPI–TIPS initiative goes beyond acceptance to full system-level interlinking. For the first time, India and Europe are working on connecting their domestic instant payment systems, laying the groundwork for real-time remittances between the two regions.

Apart from Europe, NIPL also partnered with Bahrain’s fintech BENEFIT to connect UPI with Bahrain’s Fawri+ electronic fund transfer system earlier this year. This link supports instant, secure cross-border remittances between the two countries and is aimed at Bahrain’s large Indian community, which makes up nearly 30% of the population. 

Besides these, UPI is now operational in 13 countries, with discussions underway with another 7–8 nations across the Middle East and East Asia. These links cover merchant acceptance and full cross-border remittance rails.

Some of the notable examples include the UPI–PayNow linkage with Singapore and merchant acceptance pilots in Japan with NTT Data. 

On the domestic front, the UPI transactions rose to an all-time high in the month of October, rising 5.6% month-on-month (MoM) to 20.7 Bn.