MUMBAI, Sept. 24 (Reuters) India is in negotiations with African and South American nations to assist them in developing a digital payments system based on its domestic Unified Payments Interface (UPI), with two launches expected by early 2027, according to a senior official on Tuesday.
The abroad branch of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is in negotiations with “several countries” and is nearing an agreement with one of them, according to Ritesh Shukla, CEO of NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL).
The NPCI, a quasi-regulator under the central bank, is a public, non-profit organization that oversees India’s retail payment systems. It operates UPI, the country’s most popular digital payment method, with monthly volumes rising 41% to over 15 billion transactions in August.
The NIPL, which was formed from the NPCI to promote the international adoption of India’s payment systems, has conducted conversations with at least 20 African and South American nations to assist them in developing a UPI-like system, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
Earlier this year, the NIPL struck agreements with the central banks of Peru and Namibia to assist countries in developing real-time payment systems comparable to UPI.
According to NIPL CEO Shukla, the two countries plan to start their systems in late 2026 or early 2027.
According to a second person acquainted with the conversations, Rwanda is the only country with which significant discussions have taken place. Both sources declined to be named since they were not permitted to talk.
Shukla declined to say how many nations the NIPL is in contact with or if Rwanda is among them. The Bank of Rwanda did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The NIPL is responsible for integrating UPI with other nations’ real-time payment systems, such as Singapore’s PayNow, in addition to assisting countries in the development of payment systems.
There are now seven such linkages, with “several more in the pipeline,” according to Shukla, who declined to elaborate. According to Shukla, the NIPL intends to increase its 60-member team by March 2025 to deploy more people internationally in addition to the handful of executives now stationed in Singapore and the Middle East.