The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has said it will back efforts to internationalize India’s unified payments interface (UPI) digital payments system.
“Enhanced interest evinced by major countries across the globe in India’s UPI could accelerate growth in trade and commerce with partnering countries while reducing speed and cost of remittances,” RBI said its Payments Vision 2025 report.
The central bank said it expects the UPI platform to grow by an average of 50% per year in the next three years and said the steps it wants to enact will make digital payment transactions increase more than threefold.
Meanwhile, RBI noted that “BigTechs and FinTechs play an invigorating role in onboarding new users and customizing the payment experience.”
“Given their increasingly dominant role in the payments ecosystem, a discussion paper on the need for proportionate regulation by the Reserve Bank encompassing domestic incorporation, reporting, data use, etc., shall be published,” the report stated.
Last week, RBI gave permission to FinTech RuPay to connect its cards with the UPI, allowing more people to make digital payments with cards issued by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
Read more: RuPay Card Granted First UPI Connection by India’s Central Bank
The approval marked the first time a FinTech had been allowed to make such a connection, RBI said at the time.
NPCI enables digital payments and settlement systems in India and is a project overseen by RBI and the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA).
“UPI has become the most inclusive mode of payment in India with over 26 crore unique users and 5 crore merchants on the platform,” the bank said. “In May 2022 alone, about 594 crore transactions amounting to 10.4 lakh crore rupee were processed through UPI. At present, UPI facilitates transactions by linking savings/current accounts through users’ debit cards.”
(A lakh represents a hundred thousand, and a crore is 10 million.)
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