The operator of India’s ubiquitous mobile payments network plans to tap the country’s vast overseas diaspora as a springboard for global expansion, aiming to make the platform a preferred way to transact money across borders.
“Is it possible to get 15-20 markets in the next 10 years’ time? I think that’s a top-level kind of go-to-market approach,” said Dilip Asbe, chief executive officer of the National Payments Corporation of India, which developed the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI. “The way India is self-sufficient on domestic payments, we would like to be as much self-sufficient on cross-border payments as well.”
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NPCI is in talks with Japan, Malaysia and Bahrain among others, Asbe said, adding their governments and central banks will have the final say due to geopolitical and regulatory implications. NPCI is also exploring agentic AI to enable payments through platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc.’s Gemini, Asbe said.
UPI is the world’s largest real-time payment system by transaction volume, according to the International Monetary Fund. It has transformed everyday payments in India by allowing users to transfer money instantly between bank accounts using a mobile phone, bypassing card networks for many transactions.
NPCI now wants to replicate that success overseas by linking UPI with foreign payment systems, initially focusing on countries with large Indian communities that account for the world’s biggest remittance flows.
Apps such as Google Pay and PhonePe use UPI to process payments in India, while Apple Pay has yet to launch for domestic payments.
