There were 955 million UPI transactions recorded in September
The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments might soon be available while travelling abroad, according to a report by The Economic Times.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) plans to roll out the feature in the next six months, starting with Singapore and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), sources told the publication.
“These two countries already have opened up to RuPay cards; now the target is to enable UPI payments,” a banker told the paper.
Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story.
In India, popular payments services like Google Pay, Paytm and PhonePe use the UPI facility.
The NPCI has not yet responded to a request for comment by The Economic Times.
Earlier in 2019, a committee led by Nandan Nilekani recommended the international expansion of UPI and RuPay in its report to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
The main challenge will be bringing overseas merchants onto the payments platform, the report said.
Indian travellers using UPI will give a push to its acceptance in India as well, a source told the paper. The NPCI will require the assistance of banks and merchant aggregators in the target countries to bring the merchants on board.
UPI transactions have seen a spike in the recent past. In September, 955 million UPI transactions were recorded, a 135 percent from the same month in 2018. There are 141 banks are linked to the service.
