UPI Beyond India

During our vacation in Singapore at the end of last year, I saw this banner for UPI based payment systems in their subway:


I guess that banner was a bit premature. After all, the linkage of UPI with Singapore’s PayNow happened only recently - It allows for real-time payments and reduces the transaction costs with existing methods of money transfer between the two countries.

 

Next up in the line for UPI integration are UAE, Indonesia, and Mauritius.

 

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Back home in India, while Indians can use UPI for payments, foreigners visiting India can’t. Until recently, that is. For travellers from the G-20 countries (the 20 biggest economies in the world), India has now made UPI a possibility. Visitors from those countries can apply for PPI wallets (Prepaid Payment Instruments) at the airport (only Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore for now), and then they too can “enjoy the convenience of UPI payments at over five crore merchant outlets across the country that accept QR code-based UPI payments”.

 

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QR codes, of course, are now ubiquitous in India:

“You find it pasted on a tree next to a roadside barber, propped on the pile of embroidery sold by women weavers, sticking out of a mound of freshly roasted peanuts on a snack cart… a Delhi beggar flashes it through your car’s window when you plead that you have no cash.”

Billions of mobile app money transactions take place every month.

 

This volume dwarfs anything in the West:

“The value of instant digital transactions in India last year was far more than in the United States, Britain, Germany and France. “Combine the four and multiply by four — it is more than that,” as one Indian Cabinet minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the World Economic Forum in January.”

 

Nandan Nilekani rightly point out that India could do this because it had little digital legacy infrastructure in place:

“India was able to develop afresh with a clean slate,” he said.”

 

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Bill Gates acknowledges:

“No country has built a more comprehensive (digital) platform than India.”

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