India, Singapore Ink Pact To Align Payments Interface
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) along with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have agreed to link their fast payment system interface, that is Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and PayNow. The move will allow their respective users to make fast and low cost online transfers without onboarding on to each other's payment system.
According to a statement by the RBI, the combined payment platform will come into effect by July 2022.
The UPI-PayNow linkage is being seen as a major step towards setting up a system for facilitating cross-border payments between India and Singapore. The agreement, RBI said, is also in line with G-20's goal of financial inclusion and encouraging faster and transparent cross border payments among member nations.
UPI is a mobile based quick payment system which allows users to make payments on 24 hours basis with the help of a virtual payment address (VPA), which is created by the customer. This helps in neutralising the risk of sharing bank account details by the payee.
“UPI supports both Person to Person (P2P) and Person to Merchant (P2M) payments as also it enables a user to send or receive money,” the statement by RBI said.
Earlier also India's NPCI International Private Limited and Singapore's Network For Electronic Transfers (NETS) had collaborated to facilitate cross border usage of cards based payments.
