India is seeking to expand the international footprint of its homegrown digital payments platform, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), with a particular focus on East Asia, financial services secretary M. Nagaraju said on Tuesday.
UPI is accepted in eight countries — Bhutan, Singapore, Qatar, Mauritius, Nepal, the UAE, Sri Lanka and France — allowing Indian travellers to make merchant payments abroad using the platform. Nagaraju said India now accounts for around half of global digital transactions, driven largely by UPI adoption.
According to an ACI Worldwide report, UPI commanded about 49 per cent share of global real-time payment transaction volumes, processing 129.3 billion transactions. A June 2025 International Monetary Fund (IMF) report had recognised UPI as the world’s largest retail fast-payment system by transaction volume.
“We have already expanded to some countries. We are trying to expand to a larger number of countries, especially in East Asia,” Nagaraju said at the Global Inclusive Finance India Summit in New Delhi.
UPI, operated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), enables real-time peer-to-peer and merchant transactions.
In October 2025, NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), the international arm of NPCI, announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with NTT DATA Japan, marking a significant step towards UPI acceptance in the Japanese market to enhance the payment experience for Indian tourists.
Earlier, at a high-level dialogue in Washington DC, RBI governor Sanjay Malhotra had said plans are underway to widen cross-border merchant payments through UPI-enabled QR codes. India is also supporting partner nations in deploying UPI-like sovereign payment systems or upgrading existing platforms using the UPI technology stack, with agreements already signed for rollout in several
countries.
Back home, about 20 billion transactions are made using UPI every month. “UPI has the potential to more than double to 1 billion users from the current base of 400 million, RBI governor T. Rabi Sankar said on Tuesday.
