UPI’s Universality On Rise: Now, Indians Can Pay In Euros In France With UPI, RuPay Cards

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) announced on June 17, 2022, that Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and RuPay cards will soon be accepted in France. 

This was made possible following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) and Lyra, a France-based payment services provider.

Ashwini Vaishnaw, IT Minister, said, “Considering India is doing 5.5 billion UPI transactions per month, this strategic partnership will definitely prove to be a game-changer in the digital payments ecosystem.”His full interview can be watched on NPCI’s Twitter post below.

NPCI International has signed an MOU with Lyra Network of France for acceptance of UPI and RuPay cards in France.
@AshwiniVaishnaw @GoI_MeitY pic.twitter.com/MOwGyE2zPe

With this new partnership, NPCI has now expanded India’s UPI and Rupay card’s usages in foreign lands. Click here to read more about how Indians got benefited from using UPI.

What Other Partnerships Did NPCI Do In Last Few Years?

It has been a busy last few months for NPCI, since it has been partnering up with foreign institutions in order to increase UPI and RuPay use cases outside India. NPCI partnered up with Discover Financial Services (DFS) of USA, Japan Credit Bureau (JCB) of Japan, Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) of Singapore, and other nations during the last two years for UPI and RuPay card usage expansion.

Click here to read more about how RBI plans to link RuPay credit cards with UPI.

In July 2021, NIPL (the foreign arm of NPCI) partnered with Bhutan’s central bank to launch a QR code based UPI payment solution. 

In April 2022, NIPL partnered with NeoPay, which is a payments service subsidiary of United Arab Emirate (UAE)-based Mashreq Bank. This partnership enabled Indians in the UAE to use UPI payments across payment terminals in the entire UAE.

In February 2022, NIPL partnered up with Manam Infotech to enable UPI-based payments in Nepal.

India’s UPI payments is vastly advanced than similar such payment system in use in other countries. Click here to read more about that.

Apart from NPCI, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) too has been busy increasing the use cases of UPI. Last month, the RBI decided to devise a system, wherein UPI could be used in ATM machines to withdraw cash instead of using debit or credit cards. Click here to read more about that.