India PM Modi seeks global expansion for retail payment platform

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on September 8 and made his ambitions for the country’s Unified Payments Interface clear: eleven countries down, a lot more to go.

UPI, the real-time payment system managed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), processed 24.51 billion transactions worth roughly $314 billion in August 2026 alone. Modi wants to take that infrastructure global, targeting markets where large Indian communities live and where trade volumes justify the plumbing.

The numbers behind the push

UPI isn’t just India’s most popular payment method. It handled approximately 49% of global real-time payment volume as of 2024, making it the single largest retail fast-payment system on the planet by transaction count.

The platform currently operates in 11 countries: Singapore, the UAE, France, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Qatar, Cambodia, Greece, and the Maldives. Greece and the Maldives are the newest additions to that list.

NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe said in August 2026 that the organization aims to connect with an additional 15 to 20 markets over the next decade.

The driving economic logic is remittances. India received over $155 billion in inward remittances for the fiscal year ending March 2026, cementing its position as the world’s largest recipient.

Singapore as the blueprint

Modi pointed to India’s linkage with Singapore’s PayNow as the model for future partnerships. That integration allows users in either country to send money directly between UPI and PayNow accounts, bypassing traditional correspondent banking networks that typically add days of delay and layers of fees.

Modi’s pitch is essentially: let’s replicate that template everywhere it makes sense. The priority list starts with countries hosting substantial Indian expatriate populations and those with deep bilateral trade relationships.

What this means for global payments

The remittance industry faces perhaps the most direct disruption. Traditional remittance providers charge an average of 6% or more on transfers to developing countries. UPI-linked corridors have the potential to compress those fees dramatically, as the Singapore-PayNow integration has already demonstrated with near-zero cost transfers.

China’s Alipay and WeChat Pay expanded aggressively in the 2010s, but largely by following Chinese tourists and merchants abroad rather than by linking with foreign national systems. Modi’s approach is different. He’s pursuing system-to-system interoperability. If NPCI succeeds in connecting with 15 to 20 additional markets by the mid-2030s, India will have built one of the largest cross-border payment networks in history.

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