Shukla was speaking virtually at the Matrix Global Summit in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
“Last month alone, we did 9.4 billion financial transactions,” he said. Enabling other countries to build platforms that facilitate financial inclusion, citizen welfare and fintech incubation are other goals that NIPL is pursuing, he said.
NIPL is responsible for formulating business strategy, leading business development and driving profitability by deploying NPCI’s technology and solutions in international markets.
Speaking at a session titled ‘Taking India’s Digital Public Infrastructure Global – Building Brand India’, he said: “Helping other countries create infrastructure for driving their own national agenda, building interoperability, support merchant payments when Indians travel outside, and get better experiences when they get inbound remittances as well as outbound remittances, is what we are working on.”
Several fintech platforms have created their services on UPI.
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“We are looking at those markets where there is desire to create something similar to UPI,” Shukla said. “It is gaining momentum given the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The cards given to Russians are not working outside the country. The people who are travelling to Russia for business interests or other reasons are unable to transact digitally in that market,” he added.Consequently, there is a lot of interest in countries to create sovereign platforms using technology that is within their control, and in which the data is processed locally, he said.
Another aspect of UPI’s global outreach, he said, is to build interoperability. There are around 30 million Indians who live outside India. They remit close to $100 billion dollars every year to India. Globally, the cost of cross border remittances is 6%, he said, citing a World Bank report.
“How can we make the current process more transparent with better speed and efficiency, and even improve the cost dynamics? This is another area we are focussing on,” he said.
A collaboration started in February between UPI in India and PayNow in Singapore is one such. It allows a person to send money to another on a real-time basis, whether the person is in India or in Singapore. The time of the transaction is about 17-18 seconds, he said. In India, there are currently five banks that are a part of it, and in Singapore there are two entities and “we are broad-basing it even further”, he said.
When Indians travel outside India, they should be able to use their payment instruments such as UPI, he said.
