NPCI teams up with Google Pay to expand UPI beyond India
Google Pay India has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) international payments subsidiary to expand the reach of the country’s United Payments Interface (UPI).
NPCI partners Google Pay for UPI expansion
Launched by the NPCI in April 2016, UPI operates as an instant payments system and has been recognised as a key accelerant in the real-time availability of financial services in India.
In the hope of scaling the system’s success further, the MoU is considering three main objectives, the first of which is to enable travellers outside of India to use UPI to make transactions.
Its second point of focus, the pair says, is to create “UPI-like digital payment systems for other countries”, while also trying to fulfil its final objective of “easing” remittances between countries that use the same baseline UPI infrastructure.
The overarching goal of these three initiatives together appears to be the accelerated acceptance of UPI on a global level, which will be boosted by the availability of the system on UPI-powered apps like Google Pay. With this, Indian consumers will be better connected with foreign merchants and will no longer have to rely on foreign currency, forex cards or conventional money transfer channels when attempting to make digital payments.
Deeksha Kaushal, director of partnerships at Google Pay India, says that UPI has “demonstrated to the world the step change that happens in economies with the introduction of interoperable, population scale digital infrastructure”, and each new economy that joins such a network creates impact “beyond the sum of its parts”.
Ritesh Shukla, CEO of NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL), says he anticipates that the MoU will “propel UPI onto the global stage”, and that it will not only expand the level of payment options for travellers from India, but will also “allow us to extend our knowledge…of operating a successful digital payments ecosystem to other countries”.
