In October 2025, a Japanese conglomerate and an Indian payments body signed a memorandum of understanding that most people outside the fintech world barely noticed. NIPL and NTT Data agreed to bring UPI to Japan, with a trial implementation expected to run from April 2026 through March 2027 across NTT Data's acquired merchant sites. It was a quiet announcement. It was also a significant one.

Japan is not a country that adopts foreign payment infrastructure easily. It has its own deeply embedded systems, its own card networks, its own consumer habits built over decades. The fact that India is now negotiating entry into that market — not as a vendor, not as a software exporter, but as a payments architecture — signals something that deserves more attention than it has received.

UPI is no longer just a domestic success story. It has become India's most consequential piece of exported infrastructure, and the pace of its international expansion is accelerating in ways that carry real geopolitical weight.

From Domestic Revolution to Global Standard

The numbers bear repeating because they remain genuinely difficult to absorb. UPI processed 21.63 billion transactions in December 2025, up 29 percent year-on-year, with a daily average of 698 million transactions. CoinLaw That scale has a historical parallel: UPI now handles more than 640 million transactions every day, compared to Visa's 639 million, making it the largest real-time payment system in the world. Wikipedia The IMF formalised this status in June 2025. The Fund's report on growing retail digital payments recognised UPI as the world's largest retail fast-payment system by transaction volume, with UPI holding approximately 49 percent of global real-time payment transaction volume according to ACI Worldwide's data. Press Information Bureau

To understand how dramatic the domestic transformation has been: UPI accounted for 83.4 percent of India's payments ecosystem volume in FY25, processing 185.8 billion transactions — a 41.7 percent increase from 131.1 billion in FY24. Business Standard India was a predominantly cash economy less than a decade ago. It now runs the world's highest-volume payments rail.

This did not happen by accident. The architecture of UPI — open, interoperable, built on public infrastructure rather than proprietary networks, with zero transaction costs for most users — was designed from the outset to be scalable. What was less obvious in its early years was that this same architecture would prove eminently exportable. A system that could handle hundreds of millions of users in India, that could process transactions at near-zero cost, that could be plugged into existing banking infrastructure without requiring wholesale replacement — that system turns out to be very attractive to governments around the world looking to build or upgrade their own digital payments capacity.

NPCI International Payments Limited, the overseas arm of the National Payments Corporation of India, has been the vehicle for this expansion. Its strategy operates on three distinct tracks: direct UPI rollout in markets with significant Indian tourist and diaspora presence, bilateral interlinking with other countries' fast payment systems, and the export of UPI-like sovereign infrastructure to countries building their own real-time payments capability from scratch.

The Live Footprint

UPI is currently operational in eight countries: Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the UAE. Angel One Each market tells a slightly different story about how UPI has entered and what role it plays.

Bhutan was the first, in 2021, reflecting the deep economic integration between the two neighbours. Singapore followed, with UPI integrated with PayNow and accepted at over 8,000 merchants via apps including PhonePe and Google Pay. UPILinks The Singapore integration is the most mature and is the model NIPL is attempting to replicate elsewhere — a direct bilateral link between two fast payment systems rather than a simple QR acceptance arrangement. The PayNow-UPI integration, operational since February 2023 and expanded in July 2025, enables instant cross-border fund transfers without intermediary conversions. Rupeeflo

The UAE, with its large Indian diaspora of over three million people, represents the highest-volume market. Over 60,000 outlets in the UAE now accept UPI, serving both tourists and Indian expatriates. UPILinks France became the first European country in the UPI network in 2024, a beachhead that has since been followed by Cyprus.

The aggregate cross-border numbers, while still small in absolute terms, are growing sharply. International UPI transactions crossed the one-million mark in FY26 for the first time, reaching 1.48 million as of December 2025, nearly double the 755,445 transactions recorded in all of FY25. The value of cross-border payments rose to ₹330.43 crore in FY26, up from ₹258.53 crore in FY25 and just ₹19.7 crore in FY24. Angel One The trajectory, not the absolute level, is what matters here.

The Pipeline: Markets to Watch

Europe represents one of the most strategically significant expansion areas. In June 2025, PM Modi's visit to Cyprus produced an MoU between NPCI and Eurobank Cyprus, making Cyprus the second European nation after France to adopt UPI services. Vajiram & Ravi Beyond individual country agreements, India and the European Central Bank have entered discussions on linking UPI with TIPS, Europe's instant payments infrastructure — a move that would embed UPI into pan-European payment architecture rather than individual national arrangements.

In the Middle East, in February 2025, India declared the full implementation of UPI in Qatar, with Qatar Duty Free becoming the first retailer to accept UPI transactions via QR codes, enabled through a collaboration between NIPL, QNB Group, and Japanese payment gateway NETSTARS. Wikipedia Bahrain is also in discussions to link UPI with its own fast payment system, Fawri+, a corridor that carries particular significance given the substantial Indian worker population in the country.

In February 2026, PM Modi announced that UPI would be implemented in Malaysia to facilitate digital payments across borders. Wikipedia Malaysia is also a founding member of Project Nexus, giving the bilateral arrangement an additional multilateral dimension. India and Israel agreed in February 2026 to extend UPI operations to Israel as part of bilateral agreements during Modi's visit. Wikipedia

Japan, as noted, is on a formal trial timeline from April 2026. The Philippines has been in discussions with India since 2023, with a joint working group established and an MoU on financial technologies signed, though a live date has not been confirmed. Thailand, Oman, and the Maldives are also in various stages of MoU or pilot discussions.

The longer-term RBI target is explicit and ambitious: NIPL is working to extend UPI to 20 countries by FY29. IBEF

The Multilateral Architecture: Project Nexus

Alongside bilateral country-by-country rollouts, India has made a strategic bet on multilateral infrastructure. The Reserve Bank of India joined Project Nexus in July 2024 alongside the central banks of Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements, to create a platform for instant cross-border retail payments. Inc42 Media

The significance of Project Nexus lies in its architecture. Rather than building a separate bilateral connection for every new country — the approach UPI has taken so far — Nexus requires only a single connection from an IPS operator, which then allows that system to reach all other countries in the network. Global Government Fintech For India, this means a single Nexus connection could eventually give UPI reach across a growing web of countries whose own fast payment systems are plugged in.

Project Nexus is expected to go live by 2026, with BIS describing it as a platform that could potentially serve 1.7 billion people with just its first wave of connected countries. The Asian Banker The RBI governor, at the signing in Basel, described the project's primary advantage as making cross-border payments faster and significantly less costly — two attributes that go directly to the commercial and development case for UPI internationalisation.

The Infrastructure Export Track

Perhaps the most strategically interesting dimension of UPI's global expansion is not where India is deploying UPI itself, but where it is helping other countries build their own versions. NIPL has partnered with Peru, Namibia, and Trinidad and Tobago to develop payment systems similar to India's real-time payment infrastructure, with the explicit aim of helping these countries achieve payment sovereignty and then connecting those systems to India for bilateral cross-border flows. Business Standard

The RBI has approved NIPL to deploy UPI-like infrastructure in Namibia, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica. Business Standard Kenya, Rwanda, and Mozambique are also in negotiations. India has signed MoUs covering UPI as part of digital public infrastructure packages with Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Sierra Leone, and Suriname.

This track is qualitatively different from standard UPI rollout. It positions India not merely as a payments service provider but as a builder of sovereign financial infrastructure for the Global South — a role with significant soft power implications and one that places India in direct, if unstated, competition with the digital infrastructure ambitions of both China and Western multilateral institutions.

The Commercial Gap

Honest analysis requires acknowledging what the numbers also reveal: UPI's international footprint, while growing rapidly, remains modest in absolute scale. Cross-border UPI transactions, even after the 20-fold growth of FY25, represent a fraction of a fraction of UPI's domestic volume. Merchant density outside India is thin, awareness among non-Indian merchants is limited, and the settlement architecture in most markets is still being built.

There is also a more fundamental structural question. The Singapore PayNow linkage is a genuine system-to-system interoperability model. Most other UPI international deployments are QR-code acceptance arrangements, where an Indian tourist scans a code and the transaction settles through correspondent banking channels. These are not the same thing, and scaling the former is considerably harder than scaling the latter.

As Policy Circle noted in a recent assessment, whether UPI's international expansion becomes substantive cross-border payments architecture rather than a sophisticated convenience tool for Indian travellers will depend on regulatory execution, settlement design, commercial viability, and measurable corridor outcomes — repeat usage, merchant density, transaction failure rates, and remittance cost reduction.

The Geopolitical Dimension

Despite these caveats, the trajectory is meaningful in ways that go beyond fintech. Every country that adopts UPI's infrastructure creates a dependency — technical, regulatory, and commercial — on Indian systems and standards. Every country that builds a UPI-like sovereign payment system with Indian assistance creates a long-term relationship with NPCI and, by extension, with the Indian state.

Traditional cross-border payment infrastructure has been dominated by SWIFT, Visa, and Mastercard — all Western-origin systems governed by rules made in Washington, Brussels, and New York. The Indian pitch, explicit in NIPL's communications, is for payment sovereignty: the right of a country to control its own financial infrastructure rather than rent it from foreign private networks. That pitch lands differently in Nairobi, Lima, and Port of Spain than it does in Paris or Tokyo, but it lands.

The ORF's assessment is worth noting: UPI's annual transaction value of $3.2 trillion now exceeds the entire GDPs of Italy, Brazil, and Canada. Between May 2018 and May 2025, UPI payments doubled every year. ORF Online India is not exporting a product. It is exporting a model — of what state-built digital public infrastructure can achieve at scale, and of what it might look like when that infrastructure is shared.

Which markets are next? The honest answer is that the pipeline is long and the execution track record, while improving, is still being established. Japan, Malaysia, Israel, and the Philippines are the most concrete near-term additions. Europe via TIPS and the Gulf via Fawri+ represent the two most strategically significant medium-term corridors. And across Africa and Latin America, the more patient infrastructure export play is quietly underway.

The UPI story internationally is still in its early chapters. But the direction is set, the institutional machinery is in place, and the geopolitical logic is compelling. India is building the payments layer of the Global South. That is worth paying attention to.

The Hind covers geopolitics, geoeconomics, technology, and strategic affairs from New Delhi.