The central banks of India and Singapore have launched a project to link their respective fast payment systems, UPI in India and PayNow in Singapore, to enable fund transfers on the two networks without getting on-boarded onto the other payment system, the Reserve Bank of India said on Tuesday.
The linkage between the two is targeted for operationalisation by July next year.
“The UPI-PayNow linkage is a significant milestone in the development of infrastructure for cross-border payments between India and Singapore, and closely aligns with the G20’s financial inclusion priorities of driving faster, cheaper and more transparent cross-border payments,” the RBI said in a statement.
The central bank added that the imminent linkage builds upon the earlier efforts of NPCI International Private Limited (NIPL) and Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) to enable cross-border interoperability of payments using cards and QR codes, between India and Singapore.
This won’t be the first time that UPI has explored use cases in foreign markets. In July, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had launched the payment system in Bhutan and recently it partnered with Mashreq to offer acceptance of the UPI in the UAE.
UPI, which is counted amongst the most successful real-time payments systems globally, processed 3.55 billion or 355 crore transactions worth Rs 6,39,116 crore in August after it crossed 3 billion monthly transactions in July for the first time since its inception in 2016.
