INDIA, SINGAPORE TO LINK UPI AND PAYNOW

INDIA, SINGAPORE TO LINK UPI AND PAYNOW

Context:

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced a project to link their respective fast payment systems, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and PayNow.

About the Project:

• The project has been announced to facilitate instant, low-cost, cross-border fund transfers.
• It is targeted to be operationalised by July 2022.
• The UPI-PayNow linkage will allow users of each of the 2 fast-payment systems to make instant, low-cost fund transfers on a reciprocal basis without a need to get on boarded onto the other payment system.

UPI:

• It is India’s mobile-based, ‘fast-payment’ system that facilitates customers to make payments instantly using a virtual payment address created by the customer.
• It is developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) facilitating inter-bank peer-to-peer (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions.
• The interface is managed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and works by instantly transferring funds between two bank accounts on a mobile platform.

PayNow:

• It is the fast payment system of Singapore that enables peer-to-peer fund-transfer services.
• It is a service available to retail customers of ten participating banks and 3 participating Non-Bank Financial Institutions (NFIs) in Singapore – Bank of China, CIMB Bank Berhad, HSBC, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited, Maybank, OCBC Bank, Citibank Singapore Limited, DBS Bank/POSB, Standard Chartered Bank, UOB, GrabPay, LiquidPay and Singtel Dash.