Everything You Need To Know About India's UPI in France The UPI services will be made available starting from the Eiffel Tower
By S Shanthi
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While addressing the Indian community in Paris, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India's most successful payments system UPI will be used in France.
"India and France have agreed to use UPI in France. In the coming days, it will begin from the Eiffel Tower, which means Indian tourists will now be able to pay in rupees," PM Modi said.
The UPI service is expected to offer convenient and secure transactions for Indian visitors in the country. Here are all the other details about what it means to India and France.
- This is the first time the UPI system will be used in Europe.
- National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) International has signed an MoU with France-based payments solution Lyra Networks to facilitate UPI transactions.
- Indian students to France and tourists and NRIs there can pay through UPI and RuPay using international mobile numbers at any terminal that is backed by Lyra Networks.
- However, Indian users should have a bank account in India with UPI enabled in it, and have a BHIM application or UPI-connected apps to carry out any UPI transactions.
- A few months ago, India and Singapore linked their digital payments systems, UPI and PayNow. This was conducted as an experiment to see the disruption UPI can make in the cross-border flow of money.
- India and Singapore users that hold accounts with participating entities such as Axis, DBS, ICICI, SBI and a few others from India, and DBS Singapore, Liquid Group from Singapore can transact instantly using the VPA or QR flow. The settlement is also instant & 24x7.
- The expansion of UPI to international markets basically aims to offer convenience and ease of payment for Indian tourists and expatriate populations in these countries.
- For the uninitiated, UPI, that is, Unified Payments Interface, is a system that powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application (of any participating bank), merging several banking features, seamless fund routing & merchant payments into one hood, NPCI explains. It also caters to the "Peer to Peer" collect request which can be scheduled and paid as per requirement and convenience.
- The pilot launch was on 11th April 2016 by Dr. Raghuram G Rajan, Governor, RBI at Mumbai and banks started to upload their UPI enabled Apps on Google Play store from 25th August, 2016 onwards.
- In FY 2022, PhonePe held 46 percent share of UPI usage in India, followed by Google Pay with 34 percent.
- Besides France and Singapore, UPI is available for international use in countries such as like Bhutan, UAE and Nepal.
- The countries that have shown interest in adopting UPI are Japan, Bahrain, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Qatar, and the United States.
"Rupay and UPI have critical mass in India and these are governed by NPCI. NPCI has been leading the charge to have more widespread acceptance for RuPay and UPI. There are now a number of card reciprocal arrangements in place for Rupay acceptance in virtually every country, but this is such a fragmented market that there's always room for improvement. Similar efforts are ongoing for UPI, with bilateral agreements with payment system operators and acceptance networks in other countries for inward & outward flow of money," said Sonal Saldanha, VP, Investments, 3one4 Capital, in an earlier interview.
