What India must do to gain from UPI’s global push | Opinion

Any cricket fan knows that a debut can create a media frenzy, but to build a career, a player needs to perform consistently well. The same applies to UPI, which has made a confident debut in 11 countries, including Singapore, France, and the UAE.

UPI’s dominance in domestic payments and the IMF’s recognition of it as the world’s largest real-time payment system by transaction volume have made it an attractive export. With new country announcements taking place as regularly as UPI breaks monthly volume records, a bigger question is whether the global push can benefit Indian firms and how.

UPI processed more than 24 billion transactions worth over ₹29 trillion in September 2026. In FY2025-26, it comprised 84% of India’s total digital payment volume.

Away from home, this picture is a little wider than deep. Latest numbers show that international UPI clocked about 1.5 million transactions in the first nine months of FY2026, double the volume of the whole of FY2025. That is worth about ₹330 crore and equals less than three minutes of transaction volume at home at September’s pace.

France is an interesting case. More than two years after being launched at the Eiffel Tower, mainly to lure Indian tourists, France had recorded only about 9,000 successful transactions in total by June 2026, according to Indian government figures. If you read that data another way, it shows how far UPI can go abroad with the right strategy.

I think UPI’s strongest case abroad lies in cementing its position as the key platform for moving money toward India rather than a tourist paying for a box of macarons in Paris. In 2025, according to World Bank estimates, India received about $139 billion (roughly ₹13 trillion) in remittances. Based on that, every percentage point of the cost of sending money home adds up to about $1.4 billion in transaction costs each year.

Remitting money remains stubbornly costly. According to World Bank figures, the global average cost of sending $200 abroad was 6.4% of the amount sent in the third quarter of 2025, which is more than double the UN’s target of 3%.

Linking UPI to a foreign instant-payment system, as has already been done with Singapore’s PayNow, could remove intermediaries and thereby lower transaction costs while shortening the settlement cycle. The savings, however, require deliberate design, as introducing another layer of conversion charges would only add to the costs.

Lower transaction costs would benefit users, but that wouldn’t automatically create revenue for Indian firms. For that to happen, India needs to convert UPI’s global expansion into business opportunities for domestic companies.

This would involve India selling its technology and expertise to other countries and not just getting UPI accepted in more places. NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), the international arm of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), for example, has partnered with the payment firm Lyra in France and Eurobank in Greece. If India can derive benefits in terms of licensing, processing, or technology fees, the partnerships could generate revenue for Indian firms rather than remaining merely diplomatic assets.

The first priority can be to focus on the corridors that carry the largest volumes of inward remittances, which now means looking beyond the Gulf’s historical dominance of inflows to a growing contribution from advanced economies. The RBI’s 2023-24 remittance survey found that advanced economies such as the US, UK, Singapore, Canada, and Australia together accounted for more than half of inward remittances, against 38% from the Gulf countries, with the US alone at 28%. Yet UPI has no live link with any US payment system, although a pilot led by Bank of America to connect Zelle with UPI is expected before the end of this year.

Secondly, international collaborative efforts such as Project Nexus, which is designed to link UPI with the instant-payment systems of Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia and is targeted to go live in 2027, are sound multilateral bets, but apart from Singapore, which accounts for 7% of inflows, Nexus members are not where most of India’s remittances come from. The two largest sources, the US and the UAE, are both outside it, so the biggest corridors will need direct deals. India should, therefore, keep pursuing its bilateral efforts alongside.

Interoperability is also going to play a crucial role, as few countries will copy UPI wholesale, and most would prefer tweaking it or connecting their own systems to it. This means the key links, such as foreign-exchange conversion, settlement, fraud prevention, and dispute resolution, need to be reliable and transparent so that a remitter can see the final rate or recover a misdirected transfer. If any of these were absent, a remitter would rather go back to the incumbent.

India has come to accept, somewhat reluctantly at home, that someone has to pay: after more than six years of zero merchant fees, the government fixed a ₹2,000 exemption threshold above which a 0.4% merchant charge, capped at ₹300, is due to start after Diwali. Banks and processors need revenue to sustain a system at this scale. There is no reason not to apply the same logic abroad. Participating banks, providers, and technology firms will commit to investing only if the economics of the model work in their favor.

How consistently India delivers on all of this will decide whether UPI’s debut abroad becomes a career.

Note: The above article is authored by Manish Agrawal, strategy lead at Chime, the largest neobank in the US; the views and opinions expressed here by contributors, authors, or guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of LiveMint.