India and Singapore to link their digital payment systems, says RBI

The central banks of India and Singapore announced that they will integrate their digital payment systems for “instant, low-cost cash transactions,” with the project expected to be completed by July 2022.

The Indian central bank stated in a press statement that linking the Reserve Bank's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with the Monetary Authority of Singapore's will be a “milestone in the building of infrastructure for cross-border payments.” Users will not need to be “onboarded” into any payment system because the relationship will be reciprocal.

In August, India's primary payment network, UPI, which enables both person-to-person and person-to-merchant payments, registered more than 3 billion transactions for the second month in a row. It was first released in 2016, and its popularity skyrocketed after the Covid-19 pandemic.

PayNow is a peer-to-peer payments transfer service that allows users in Singapore to send and receive money instantly from one bank or e-wallet account to another.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.