UPI going global, Project Nexus to accelerate the process, says Economic Survey

UPI going global

The Reserve Bank of India is working with several countries to internationalise the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which will bring more efficiency to national and cross-border payment systems, Economic Survey 2023-2024 has said.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been collaborating bilaterally with various countries to link India’s Fast Payments System (FPS), which is UPI, with their respective FPSs for cross-border person-to- person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) payments.

Indians can now make UPI payments including using the popular scan-and-pay method in several countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, West East and Europe.

The government is also looking to replace card payments by Indians in these countries for merchant payments, while replacing other corporate channels for international remittances.

The Indian central bank has joined Project Nexus, a multilateral international initiative to enable instant cross-border retail payments by interlinking domestic FPSs, the survey noted.

The Nexus aims to connect the FPSs of four ASEAN countries — Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand — and India, who would be the founding members and first mover countries of this platform, it added. The agreement was signed by the BIS and the central banks of the founding countries on June 30, 2024 and the platform is expected to go live by 2026.

“Once functional, Nexus is expected to play an important role in making retail cross-border payments efficient, faster, and more cost-effective,” the survey noted.Follow our live blog for the latest on the Economic Survey 2024

Transactions through UPI platform crossed the 100- billion mark in the calendar year 2023 to close at around 118 billion.  UPI does around 12 billion transactions a month.

NPCI, which runs UPI, is also helping other countries to set up the digital infrastructure to build UPI-like real-time payments system. This will also help India link UPI with their FPS apart from creating goodwill with other emerging economies.