India’s UPI payment developer eyes diaspora for growth

India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform, developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), is seeking to expand globally by leveraging the country's extensive overseas diaspora, according to Dilip Asbe, CEO of NPCI. Asbe envisions the potential for UPI to become a preferred method for cross-border transactions within the next decade, aiming to establish the system in 15-20 markets.

NPCI is currently engaging in discussions with nations such as Japan, Malaysia, and Bahrain, with the final decisions resting on geopolitical and regulatory considerations from the targeted countries' governments and central banks. Additionally, NPCI is exploring the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly agentic AI, to facilitate payments through platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc's Gemini.

UPI, hailed by the International Monetary Fund as the world's largest real-time payment system by volume, has revolutionized daily transactions in India by enabling instant transfers between bank accounts via mobile phones, sidestepping card networks for many transactions. Leveraging this success, NPCI intends to replicate UPI's model overseas, focusing initially on countries with significant Indian populations to capitalize on the world's largest remittance flows.