On Tuesday, UPI-PayNow was officially launched by Singapore’s PM Lee Hsien Loong and India’s PM Narendra Modi. A collaboration project of India’s Reserve Bank of India and Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore, the UPI-PayNow initiative, was announced in 2021.

The alliance is built upon Network for Electronic Transfers and NPCI International Payments Limited to enable card and QR code payment interoperability. And will facilitate trade, travel, and remittance flow. The move also supports India’s G20 Presidency priorities of creating faster, more transparent, cheaper cross-border payments.

If a user wishes to send Singapore Dollars from India to Singapore, log in to your bank’s mobile app or net banking, go to Foreign Outward remittance, agree with the terms, and enter the beneficiary’s number or VPA. Once verified, proceed to make the payment after checking the summary and exchange rates. And confirm the payment with an OTP or a UPI pin.

Meanwhile, if you wish to send Indian Rupees from Singapore to India, using PayNow participating members mobile app, go to overseas transfer, select UPI and enter UPI ID. Upon verification, enter the amount after seeing the equivalent in Singapore’s fiat currency.

A cross-border transfer was undertaken between Reserve Bank of India’s Governor Shaktikanta Das and Monetary Authority of Singapore’s MD Ravi Menon and was witnessed by PM Lee and PM Modi.

Eight financial institutions live on the linkage, such as Singapore’s DBS and Liquid Group and India’s Axis Bank, DBS India, ICICI Bank, Indian Bank, Indian Overseas Bank and the State Bank of India.

“UPI is enhancing its partnership with various other countries. Singapore is the first country with which we have today launched a Person to Person (P2P) payments facility,” said PM Modi on occasion.

Whereas PM Lee shared, “The idea of linking PayNow and UPI was first conceived in 2018 when PM Modi first visited Singapore. Since then, our two central banks have been working on this…I am very glad that the PayNow-UPI linkage has now become a reality.”

The linkage is said to be the world’s first such linkage to feature cloud-based infrastructure and have participation from non-banking financial institutions.