NPCI International teams up with digital payments infra provider PPRO

NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), a wholly owned subsidiary of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has signed a definitive agreement with global digital payments infrastructure provider PPRO to widen the reach of the RuPay cards and UPI.

The UK-based PPRO's global clients include payment service providers (PSPs) and global merchant acquirers around the world, NPCI said in a media statement on Thursday.

“UPI has revolutionised the digital payments landscape in India... By partnering with PPRO, Indian consumers will now be able to shop online with merchants around the world and pay safely and easily using UPI," NIPL chief executive Ritesh Shukla said in the statement.

This association will also drive NIPL’s expansion into foreign markets and will add India to PPRO’s Local Payment Method (LPM) coverage map.

Launched in 2016, UPI is a prominent instant payment system, processing 60 percent of all domestic payments in India and 40 percent of instant payments processed globally.

UPI as a platform has over 325 million active users and supports 390 banks and 100 third-party apps with complete interoperability. In March 2023 alone, UPI processed over 8.7 billion transactions, the highest since its launch.

The partnership between NIPL and PPRO will empower the global PSPs, banks, payment gateways, and enterprises with payment platforms to expand globally giving international e-commerce merchants access to Indian consumers.

For consumers, this means they can seamlessly make cross-border purchases in Indian Rupees using their favourite payment method, the statement said.

“International payment service providers and their merchants can now easily tap into an e-commerce market that is expected to reach an estimated $111 billion next year, and predicted to almost double to $200 billion by 2026," said Simon Black, CEO-PPRO

Black added that by integrating UPI into PPRO’s digital payments infrastructure through a single connection, we have removed all the operational complexity for our partners to sell cross-border into India at scale.

Global adoption of UPI is accelerating in the past couple of months. In February, to facilitate swift cross-border remittances for residents of India and Singapore, the Reserve Bank of India announced the UPI- PayNow linkage – the real-time payment system linkage between India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and its equivalent network of Singapore, PayNow.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) are also in early talks with Thailand, Sri Lanka and other countries to extend the reach of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).