India and Singapore to link their payments systems to enable ‘instant and low-cost’ cross-border transactions
India and Singapore are working to link their digital payments systems to enable “instant, low-cost fund transfers,” in a major push to disrupt the cross-border transactions between the two nations that amounts to over $1 billion each year.
The project to link India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Singapore’s PayNow is targeted for operationalization by July 2022, both nation’s central banks said on Tuesday. Users on either of the systems will be able to make transactions to one another without having to sign up to the second platform, the banks added.
“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,” said Monetary Authority of Singapore in a press statement.
UPI, a five-year-old payments infrastructure developed by a coalition of retail banks, has become the most popular ways users in India transfer money to one another and to businesses.
