The use of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for cross-border payments has continued to rise sharply, with more than six lakh transactions being conducted in the first four months of the current fiscal, just 1.5 lakh fewer than the number of such transactions done in all of 2024-25.
According to data provided by Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary in response to a written question in the Lok Sabha on Monday, the total number of cross-border UPI transactions performed so far in this fiscal till July is 6.01 lakh. In all of 2024-25, the number of these transactions stood at 7.55 lakh.
In value terms, cross-border UPI transactions worth Rs 169.29 crore have been performed so far in this fiscal compared to Rs 258.53 crore last year, data provided by Chaudhary showed. Should the current monthly rate hold, the number and value of cross-border UPI transactions could rise to 18 lakh and Rs 508 crore, respectively, for the full year.
The use of UPI for international payments had sharply increased in 2024-25, when the number of transactions had jumped 20-fold and their value by 13 times compared to 2023-24, when a total of 37,060 transactions worth Rs 19.7 crore were performed.
“The Government, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) have been working towards linking UPI with the FPSs of other countries to facilitate cross-border payments. Presently, UPI is live in 7 countries i.e. UAE, Nepal, Bhutan, Singapore, Mauritius, France and Sri Lanka,” Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary informed the Lok Sabha on Monday.
FPS refers to a fast-payment system such as the UPI.
Back in February 2023, Singapore became the first country with which Indians could make cross-border person-to-person payments following the linking of UPI with Singapore’s own fast-payment system PayNow. Since then, UPI has become operational in six other countries.
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Linking of fast-payment systems is a key way of cutting down on time and cost inefficiencies in cross-border payments. Towards this, the RBI last year joined Project Nexus of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a global organisation of central banks. Project Nexus looks to standardise the manner in which fast-payment systems connect to each other. This, according to the BIS, could “significantly accelerate the growth of instant cross-border payments”.
In addition to linking the UPI with other countries’ fast-payment systems, India is also helping nations without such systems build their own. These include Namibia, Trinidad & Tobago, and Peru.
To be sure, use of the UPI for cross-border payments is still at a fairly nascent stage and is dwarfed by its use domestically. As per latest RBI data, just in the first 10 days of August, as many as 678 crore UPI transactions have been made worth a total of Rs 9.04 lakh crore.
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