Google Pay and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) will work together to expand Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the instant payments system widely use in the country, to international markets, confirm by Google and NPCI.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has sign between Google Pay India and NPCI subsidiary, NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL), to bring the instant payment functionality to other countries.
UPI has become a widespread mode of digital payment throughout India in recent years, with interoperability between payments apps like Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm.
The value process via UPI payments in 2023 stood at Rs. 167 lakh crores, as per Google.
The MoU sign between Google Pay India and NIPL primarily seeks to ease digital payments abroad for travellers outside of India.
The collaboration will also aid in establishing a UPI-style digital payments infrastructure in other countries, a press release for the announcement said.
Also, Google and NPCI aim to leverage the UPI infrastructure to ease the process of remittances between countries, to simplifying cross-border financial exchanges.
Deeksha Kaushal, director of partnerships at Google Pay India said :
“UPI has demonstrated to the world the step change that happens in economies with the introduction of interoperable, population scale digital infrastructure and each economy that joins such networks will create impact beyond the sum of parts,”.
As per the press release, the initiative will also help bring Indian customers to foreign merchants, reducing the need for credit or forex cards and instead allow UPI apps like Google Pay for international digital payments.
Ritesh Shukla, CEO of NPCI International Payments Limited, said :
“This strategic partnership will not only simplify foreign transactions for Indian travellers but will also allow us to extend our knowledge and expertise of operating a successful digital payments ecosystem to other countries,”.
In 2023, Google Pay introduce a UPI Lite feature on its platform that enables small-value digital payments with just one tap, without the need to enter the UPI PIN, as require in regular transactions.
UPI Lite supports a maximum instant transaction of up to Rs. 200 at a time.
You can load their UPI Lite account with up to Rs. 2,000, twice a day.
In August 2023, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) increase the UPI Lite transaction limit from Rs. 200 to Rs. 500.
The overall wallet limit was retain at Rs. 2,000 only.
A month later, NPCI said that UPI transactions had cross the 10-billion mark in August 2023.
As per the NPCI data, number of UPI transactions stood at 10.24 billion on 30th August 2023.
In value terms, the transactions amount to Rs. 15,18,456.4 crore exchanging hands.
