New Delhi: India and Singapore have linked their digital payments systems, UPI and PayNow, to enable instant and low-cost fund transfers in a major push to disrupt the cross-border transactions between the two nations that amount to over $1 billion each year.
The linkage between the two systems went live Tuesday, the two nations’ central banks said at a press conference. Reserve Bank of India’s Governor Shaktikanta Das and the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Managing Director Ravi Menon launched the new linkage, in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
Eight banks including DBS, Liquid Group, Axis Bank and State Bank of India from Singapore and India are currently participating in the collaboration, they said. Citizens in each nation can use their local payments systems to send money to those in the foreign land in “real-time.”
For now, an Indian user can remit up to 1000 Singapore dollars a day, the Reserve Bank of India said.
The two nations announced their plan to link their payments systems in 2021 and had originally set a deadline of July 2022 to go live with the collaboration.
“A new milestone in India-Singapore relations as we link real-time digital payments systems,” hailed PM Modi.
“The PayNow-UPI linkage is India’s first cross-border, real-time system linkage and Singapore’s second. It’s also the world’s first such linkage featuring cloud-based infrastructure and participation by non-bank financial institutions,” said Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the conference.
“As we progressively add more users and use cases, the PayNow and UPI linkage will grow in utility and contribute more to facilitating our trade and our people to people links,” he added.
UPI, a seven-year-old payments infrastructure developed by a coalition of retail banks, has become the most popular way Indians transact online.
The system, adopted by scores of local and global firms including Walmart, Google and Facebook, processes over 8 billion transactions a month. Like UPI, Singapore’s PayNow also offers interoperability between banks and payments apps in the nation, allowing users from one payment app to make transactions to those on other apps.
