Govt, RBI giving big push to cross-border digital payments: NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe
NPCI is actively partnering with the government and RBI to execute the vision of enabling seamless cross-border digital payment infrastructure.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Union government are actively pushing forward the digital payments infrastructure outside of the country starting with cross-border payments, said Dilip Asbe, CEO and MD of NPCI, on Friday.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) will play a big part in executing these plans, he said at a fireside conversation at the second edition of TechSparks Mumbai. “There are solid pipes already built in India, which are like digital payment highways, and government [and] RBI is looking to build similar highways cross-border,” said Asbe.
There has been a concerted effort from the government and the RBI to replicate the success of digital payments infrastructure in India, especially the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), in other geographies.
According to Asbe, the focus of RBI and the government is on cross-border payments and focus on use cases like Indians travelling abroad and the diaspora residing overseas. “The RBI is trying to connect the account to account transfer on a real-time basis.”
The NPCI CEO also recalled statements made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who emphasised that the public good of India (UPI, Aadhaar) can become the public good of the world, where they can adopt the readymade stack already built by India. “NPCI international is trying to execute the vision,” Asbe said.
The government's efforts have begun to bear fruit with countries like France, the UAE, Singapore, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Maldives, and Bhutan, agreeing to enable digital payments in various forms, including UPI.
Edited by Suman Singh