This collaboration will also help the Indian expatriate in Singapore.
New Delhi:
In what is a first-of-its-kind collaboration with another country, India and Singapore on Tuesday linked their respective online payment systems – India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Singapore’s PayNow – for seamless cross-border transactions. both countries.
The virtual launch ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong.
The integration of these two payment systems of both the countries will enable faster and more cost-effective transfer of cross-border remittances to the residents of both the countries. People of both the countries will be able to send money in real time using QR-code based or just by entering the mobile number linked to the bank account.
“Connecting fintech services between India and Singapore will take technology to a new level,” PM Modi said at the launch event.
“It will provide a low-cost real-time platform for remittance transfer to people in both the countries,” PM Modi said.
Shaktikanta Das, Governor, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and Ravi Menon, Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the country’s apex financial authority, also presided over the launch event.
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 globalization of India’s digital payment infrastructure.
One of the major thrusts of PM Modi has been to ensure that the benefits of UPI are not limited to India only, but other countries also benefit from it.
This collaboration will help Indian expatriates in Singapore, especially migrant workers and students, through quick and low-cost transfers from Singapore to India and from Singapore to India.
Separately, keeping in mind the popularity of the UPI payment system, the Reserve Bank of India proposed to allow all travelers visiting India to use UPI for their merchant payments during their stay in the country.
The UPI payment system has become extremely popular in India for retail digital payments, and adoption is growing at a rapid pace.
On February 8, the RBI governor made this announcement while considering the outcome of the three-day Monetary Policy Committee meeting.
Initially, this facility will be extended to passengers from G-20 countries arriving at “select international airports”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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