The National Payments Corporation of India has signed interoperability agreements with central banks and payment networks in 12 additional countries, extending UPI acceptance to more than 30 international markets.
The new corridors span Southeast Asia, the Gulf, East Africa and parts of Europe, letting Indian travellers pay at local merchants by scanning domestic QR codes from any UPI app.
For receiving countries, the agreements open a low-cost real-time rail for remittances into India — the world's largest remittance market at over $120 billion annually.
Bankers say the bigger story is soft power: UPI's architecture is becoming the de facto template for instant payment systems across the Global South.
