Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday called on India’s fintech industry to expand the global footprint of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), particularly by linking it with payment systems in countries with large Indian diaspora populations, to reduce remittance costs and speed up money transfers.
Addressing the 7th Global Fintech Fest after its inauguration, Modi said UPI should focus on countries that have large Indian communities, high trade volumes with India or are willing to partner with New Delhi to connect their payment systems.
“Indians work in large numbers in foreign countries. They are the largest remitters of money. A part of the remittances goes away as transaction costs; UPI can help in saving on these costs and the money can also reach families faster,” he said.
UPI is now live in 11 countries and has been linked with Singapore’s local payment system, Modi said, describing the integration as making cross-border transactions between the two countries almost as seamless as domestic payments.
He said India should move beyond being a user of global payment technologies and play a role in setting standards and connecting them with systems worldwide.
Modi also called for the next phase of fintech growth to focus beyond payments, including easier access to savings, pensions, insurance and other financial services.
Citing the PM-SVANidhi scheme, he said UPI-enabled digital payments had helped increase the average annual income of street vendors benefiting from the initiative by 20 per cent.
Technology, he said, could enable fintech companies to develop personalised financial products and make access to non-payment services as simple as making a payment through a QR code.
The Prime Minister also urged the sector to set specific targets around emerging technologies, including agentic artificial intelligence, tokenisation and quantum technology.
At the same time, he stressed the need for stronger cybersecurity, ethical data protection standards and a transparent fintech consumer protection index to rate companies.
India also needs a stronger fintech-regulator-industry-innovation ecosystem, Modi said.
On the economy, Modi said India’s 7.8 per cent real GDP growth had strengthened global confidence despite a challenging quarter marked by the highest impact of the West Asia conflict.
He said the global economy was facing geopolitical conflicts and uncertainty, pressure on energy and commodity supply chains and challenges related to oil.
Referring to Japan Credit Rating Agency’s upgrade of India’s sovereign rating to ‘A-’ from ‘BBB+’, Modi said it reflected international confidence in India’s growth momentum, macroeconomic stability and structural reforms. He noted that it was the agency’s first such upgrade for India in three decades.
(With inputs from PTI)