The government is working to expand the international footprint of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), with a particular focus on East Asia, as India seeks to make its digital payments architecture a global standard.
Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju said at the Global Inclusive Finance India Summit that India has already begun extending UPI to overseas markets and plans to accelerate this effort.
UPI is currently accepted in eight countries—Bhutan, Singapore, Qatar, Mauritius, Nepal, the UAE, Sri Lanka and France—allowing Indian travellers to make seamless digital payments abroad. “We have expanded to some countries and are trying to take it to many more. Right now, our focus is especially on East Asia,” Nagaraju said, underlining the ambition to broaden acceptance of India’s home-grown real-time payments network.
UPI’s scaling success
India now accounts for about 50% of global real-time digital transactions, a scale achieved largely on the back of UPI. Transactions crossed 21 billion in December 2025, reflecting the system’s deep penetration across consumers and merchants.
Nagaraju attributed this surge not only to technological adoption but also to the rapid expansion of financial inclusion under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY). Since its launch in 2014, more than 530 million bank accounts have been opened, 72 per cent in rural and semi-urban areas, with women holding 56% of the accounts. Deposits under PMJDY have risen to Rs 2.29 lakh crore, making it the world’s largest financial inclusion programme.
Leveraging digital infrastructure
Beyond enabling payments, the government has leveraged this digital infrastructure to extend credit and insurance to previously underserved groups. Under the Mudra scheme, over 563 million loans worth nearly Rs 38 lakh crore have been sanctioned since 2015, two-thirds of them to women entrepreneurs. India’s six lakh banking correspondents continue to take basic financial services to villages and neighbourhoods.
However, Nagaraju cautioned that inclusion must translate into sustainable growth. He stressed the need to help micro-enterprises graduate into medium and large businesses through better market access, productivity gains and technology adoption. He also flagged priorities such as updating KYC for early PMJDY accounts, strengthening financial literacy and enhancing cybersecurity.
Looking ahead, Nagaraju outlined a three-pillar approach: financial inclusion, financial literacy and financial security through access to credit, insurance and pensions.
Together with the global expansion of UPI, he said, this framework can make India’s digital public infrastructure both a domestic growth engine and an international benchmark.