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

The central banks of India and Singapore will link their digital payment systems for "instant, low-cost fund transfers", said the two sides on Tuesday, aiming to finish the project by July 2022.

Linking Reserve Bank’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Monetary Authority of Singapore’s will be a "milestone in the development of infrastructure for cross-border payments", said the Indian central bank in a press statement. The linkage will be reciprocal and won’t need users to get "onboarded" onto either payment system.

UPI, which supports person to person and person to merchant payments, is India’s flagship payment platform and logged more than 3 billion transactions for the second consecutive month in a row in August. It was launched in 2016 and has seen sharp growth during the Covid-19 outbreak.

PayNow enables peer-to-peer funds transfer service, enabling users to send and receive instant funds from one bank or e-wallet account to another in Singapore.