India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) technology will now be accepted in neighbouring Sri Lanka. Apart from UPI’s acceptance, several agreements were also exchanged between India and Sri Lanka in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe in the national capital on Friday.

In India, the UPI payments system has become hugely popular for retail digital payments and its adoption is rapidly increasing across the world. So far, France, UAE, and Singapore had partnered with India on emerging fintech and payment solutions.

UPI is India’s mobile-based fast payment system, which facilitates customers to make round-the-clock payments instantly, using a Virtual Payment Address (VPA) created by the customer.

Indian and Singapore signed an agreement to link their respective payment systems in February 2023. With this, the users in either country will now be able to make cross-border transactions. People in both countries will be able to send money in real-time via QR-code based or simply by entering mobile numbers linked to the bank account.

In addition, France had also agreed to use the UPI payment mechanism earlier this month. It will begin from the iconic and tourist hotspot Eiffel Tower.

An MoU was also exchanged to interlink the payment and messaging systems between the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Central Bank of the UAE which will facilitate the integration UPI of India and the Instant Payments Platform (IPP) of the UAE.

India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing ecosystems for fintech innovation and the PM Modi-led government has been instrumental in driving the globalisation of India’s digital payment infrastructure, ANI reported.

The Indian government has been keenly emphasizing ensuring that the benefits of UPI are not limited to India only, but other countries, too, benefit from it. RBI has also proposed to permit all inbound travellers to India to use UPI for their merchant payments while they are in the country.

The facility will be extended to travellers from G20 countries arriving at “select international airports”, as per ANI reports.

On February 8, the RBI governor Skaktikanta Das made the announcement while deliberating upon the outcome of the three-day monetary policy committee meeting.

(With ANI inputs)