A government official says that India’s payments body wants to push digital payments in Africa and South America

According to a senior official on Tuesday, India is in negotiations with nations in South America and Africa to assist them in developing digital payment systems using its own Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as a model. Two launches are anticipated by early 2027.

According to Ritesh Shukla, CEO of NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL), the international division of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is in negotiations with “several countries” and is nearing an agreement with one of them.

For India’s retail payment systems, the NPCI is a public non-profit organization that functions as a quasi-regulator under the central bank.

It facilitates UPI, the most widely used digital payment method in the nation, whose monthly volume increased by 41% to around 15 billion transactions in August.

A person with knowledge of the talks stated that the NIPL, which was separated from the NPCI to encourage the adoption of Indian payment systems abroad, had discussions with at least 20 South American and African nations to assist them in creating a system akin to UPI.

The NIPL inked agreements with the central banks of Namibia and Peru earlier this year to assist them in developing real-time payment systems akin to UPI.

According to NIPL CEO Shukla, the two nations plan to introduce their systems by the end of 2026 or the beginning of 2027.

“Rwanda is the only one with which serious discussions have happened” regarding the other nations, according to a second source with knowledge of the talks. Since neither source is permitted to speak to the media, they both declined to be identified.

Shukla refused to say how many nations the NIPL is in negotiations with or if Rwanda is one of them. A request for comment was not immediately answered by the Bank of Rwanda.

In addition to assisting nations in developing payment systems, the NIPL is responsible for establishing connections between UPI and other nations’ real-time payment systems, such Singapore’s PayNow.

“Several more are in the pipeline,” according to Shukla, who declined to disclose specifics. There are already seven such links.

In order to send additional employees abroad in addition to the few executives the company presently employs in Singapore and the Middle East, the NIPL intends to treble its 60-person workforce by March 2025, according to Shukla.