India to help South America, Africa build UPI-like digital payments system

India is in talks with countries in Africa and South America to help them build a digital payments system using its homegrown Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as a blueprint and expects two launches by early 2027, a senior official said on Tuesday. The overseas arm of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is in talks with "several countries" and is closing in on an agreement with one of them, said Ritesh Shukla, CEO of NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL).

The NPCI, a quasi-regulator under the central bank, is a public non-profit organisation for retail payment systems in India. It runs UPI, the country's most popular digital payments mode, whose monthly volumes surged 41 per cent to nearly 15 billion transactions in August. The NIPL, carved out of the NPCI to promote the adoption of India's payment systems overseas, has held talks with at least 20 countries in Africa and South America to help them develop a UPI-like system, a source aware of the discussions said.

Earlier this year, the NIPL signed deals with the central banks of Peru and Namibia to help them build real-time payment systems similar to UPI. The two countries are expected to launch their systems by late 2026 or early 2027, NIPL CEO Shukla said. Among the other countries, "Rwanda is the only one with which serious discussions have happened", a second source familiar with the discussions said. Both the sources declined to be named as they are not authorised to speak to the media.

Shukla declined to provide the number of countries the NIPL is in talks with and whether Rwanda is among them. The Bank of Rwanda did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Besides helping countries build payment systems, the NIPL is also tasked with linking UPI with other countries' real-time payment systems, such as Singapore's PayNow. There are seven such links already and "several more are in the pipeline," Shukla said, declining to provide details.

The NIPL plans to double its 60-member team by March 2025 to deploy more staff overseas besides the handful of executives it has in Singapore and the Middle East currently, Shukla said.