NPCI International Arm To Expand UPI To 4-6 New Countries In 2025

NPCI International Payments (NIPL), the international arm responsible for NPCI’s homegrown payment products globally, is expanding the reach of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to four to six countries in 2025, as per the senior official.

NPIL, the payments body, which is a wholly-owned subordinate of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is planning to go live with UPI in different countries relevant to Indian tourists, such as Qatar, Thailand, and the broader Southeast Asian region.

The CEO of NIPL, Ritesh Shukla during a media interaction said, “While NPCI in India works at a breakneck speed, we have partners outside India who have their way of completing projects.” He also added that they are hopeful of going live in 3-4 more countries in 2025, and if projects are completed on time, six countries are the ultimate goal for them.

NPCI International Payments To Expand

Currently, UPI payments are accepted in seven countries, including Bhutan Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and France. With this, twenty apps, including third-party application providers such as BHIM, PhonePe, Paytm, and Google Pay, support international transactions.

Adding further Ritesh Shukla said, “We are now looking at building traction in the markets where we have gone live. This means creating awareness on both sides—merchants and peers.

“We are working with banks in India to educate customers on using UPI internationally, working with fintech to create notifications as users land in foreign markets, and we live in six airports at international terminals”, added Shukla.

Also, the organisation is working with countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Mauritius to help them create a card scheme similar to RuPay.

Spitting out more information, Shukla said, “On an infrastructure level, we are helping other countries become sovereign in their domestic payment needs. Once these systems are ready and thriving, we will look to connect them with India to serve cross-border flows on a bilateral basis between the two markets.”

Moreover, Ritesh told the media that NIPL is targeting foreign use cases such as peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions that are similar to UPI in India. For P2P transactions, NIPL works on a two-pronged strategy that includes bilateral and multilateral efforts.

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