The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in collaboration with NPCI International Payments Ltd. (NIPL) has planned to take the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to over 20 nations by financial year 2029. As per the central bank’s annual report, the government is also exploring Fast Payment System (FPS) collaboration with a group of countries like the European Union and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), as well as multilateral linkages. The RBI’s annual report states that the government is working on building measures to increase the global reach of UPI and RuPay.
“In light of goals for Viksit Bharat 2047, the Reserve Bank, along with NPCI International Payments Ltd. (NIPL) will work towards taking UPI to 20 countries with an initiation timeline of 2024-25 and completion timeline of 2028-29,” RBI said in its annual report.
UPI goes global
Recently, France and Nepal became two of the nations to accept UPI payments via QR codes for merchant (e-commerce) transactions. Including these two, India so far has agreements for UPI payments with seven nations such as Sri Lanka, Mauritius, UAE, Singapore, and Bhutan.
Today, UPI is used at all levels from smallest street vendors to big shopping malls. As a user-friendly mode of payment, it is used for both person-to-person (PSP) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions. It allows immediate money transactions/transfers across the majority of banks through mobile devices round the clock 24x7 and 365 days.
The RBI’s Payments Vision Document 2025 also talks about pushing the global reach of UPI and RuPay cards as one of its primary targets. As per this report, the RBI is working towards establishing cooperative pacts with different central banks.
Earlier in February, India and Mauritius signed an agreement for RuPay cards and UPI connectivity between both nations. The agreement allows Indian travellers to pay merchants via UPI apps in Mauritius and vice versa. During the same month, UPI connectivity was established between India and Sri Lanka wherein Indian travellers can make QR code-based payments at merchant locations in Sri Lanka using UPI applications.
Authentication for Safe transactions
The RBI annual report also noted that at present payments ecosystem (card networks/banks/PPI entities) have widely accepted SMS-based one-time passwords (OTP) as an additional factor of authentication (AFA). Since this alone isn’t enough to tackle the rising instances of online fraud based on payments, the authorities are looking at various innovative solutions that are now available to address the fraud and friction in payments.
With the advancements in technology, RBI is looking to explore an alternate risk-based authentication mechanism to leverage behavioural biometrics, location-historical payments, digital tokens, and in-app notifications.
