BENGALURU: In a significant move aimed to facilitate the low-cost cross border transactions, the Reserve Bank of India has announced a collaboration with the Singapore’s central bank, Monetary Authority of Singapore, to link their respective real-time payment systems, United Payment Interface (UPI) and Paynow respectively. The linkage is expected to be implemented by July 22.
Singapore has , thus, become the second country after the United Arab Emirates(UAE) which has adopted the UPI payment system of India through which the users can make bank transfers on their mobile phones using a phone number. This comes at a time when UPI’s popularity as a digital payment system is at an-time high crossing 3 billion transactions in volume per month.
RBI said in a statement that the UPI-PayNow linkage is a significant milestone in the development of infrastructure for cross-border payments between India and Singapore, and closely aligns with the G20’s financial inclusion priorities of driving faster, cheaper and more transparent cross-border payments.
The linkage builds upon the earlier efforts of NPCI International Private Limited (NIPL) and Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) to foster cross-border interoperability of payments using cards and QR codes, between India and Singapore and will further anchor trade, travel and remittance flows between the two countries, the RBI said.
As per a statement by the MAS,. When implemented, fund transfers can be made from India to Singapore using mobile phone numbers, and from Singapore to India using UPI virtual payment addresses (VPA). The experience of making a PayNow transfer to a UPI VPA will be similar to that of a domestic transfer to a PayNow VPA, it added.
Payment interoperability
The linkage builds upon the earlier efforts of NPCI International Private Limited (NIPL) and Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) to foster cross-border interoperability of payments using cards and QR codes, between India and Singapore