Can India’s UPI system go global?

In November 2019, Alphabet-owned Google wrote to the US Federal Reserves, asking the central bank to design its upcoming instant payments system FedNow on the lines of India’s Unified Payments Interface or UPI.

It said, an open payments system fosters collaboration between technology and financial service providers, adding that India’s approach attained “amazing” results for banks, consumers and other players within the payments ecosystem.

In 2021, UPI processed around 39 billion transactions totalling $940 billion, equivalent to 31% of India’s GDP.

As if on cue, in August 2020, the National Payments Corporation of India, which operates UPI, launched NPCI International Payments, a subsidiary tasked with exporting NPCI’s indigenously developed offerings like UPI and the RuPay card network to foreign markets.