Davos 2024: Japanese Monetary Authority to adopt India's digital payment models says Ashwini Vaishnaw

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

The Japanese Monetary Authority along with a few large banks in the world will be implementing a digital payment stack model adopted by India which includes the Unified Payments Interface launched by the National Payments Corporation of India  (NPCI), said Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on January 18.

Speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Vaishnaw said that Japan's digital transformation minister (Kono Taro) met and shared the progress.

"Two of the largest banks in the world have decided to go forward on that. And the Japanese Monetary Authority as well as many European countries are looking at this stack as the solution for their countries and also for cross-border payments," the minister said.

During the G7 summit, Japan announced that it would send a team to study India’s UPI payment mode to link the systems. Eventually, India and Japan got into a Memorandum of Understanding to adopt the digital payment models.

"During the last G7 meeting in Japan, we had signed a memorandum of understanding between Japan and India for implementing the digital stack and especially the payment system in Japan," Vaishnaw said.

India’s move towards democratisation of digital public infrastructure has been welcomed by developing countries as well as by larger economies.

UPI platform echoed throughout Singapore as the two countries inked a pact to launch cross-border connectivity between the UPI and its Singapore counterpart PayNow.

The UAE, Bhutan, and Nepal have already adopted the UPI payment system and NPCI International is in talks to extend the UPI services in the US, European countries, and West Asia.

Transactions through the unified payments interface (UPI) platform crossed the 100 billion mark in the calendar year 2023 to close at around 118 billion, as per the data shared by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).