Countries like Singapore, Bhutan and France have shown interest in adopting India’s payment channels Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and RuPay, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday.

The government has sustainably brought financial inclusion that is very unique to India and it is capturing the eyes of the world, she said, speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2022. “Countries today such as Singapore, Bhutan, France’s Lyra, and also many others are seeing the use for RuPay cards and entire UPI. Indistack, particularly the payment stack, has been very well recognised and people are looking to share their thoughts with India. Many of our bilateral engagements with our counterparts today focus on this subject,” the finance minister said.

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National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is taking UPI international by helping other countries to create their payment systems. It is also making cross-border payments easier using UPI or RuPay cards acceptance for remittances, Sitharaman said.

She characterised the government’s push for financial inclusion and the availability of financial services through IndiaStack as having four different layers. The first is the presence-less layer, in which Aadhar has played a role. The second is the paperless layer, also powered through Aadhar-enabled systems, such as e-KYC, e-sign, and DigiLocker. The third is the cashless layer – UPI, Aadhaar-enabled Payment System (AePS) and Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) and the fourth one is the account aggregator (AA) framework, which introduces the element of a consent layer.

The digitisation of financial services in India has brought many unbanked Indian citizens, previously part of the informal economy, under the ambit of formal sources of financial services. “This is why you find an increase in the extent to which UPI is being used, not just in the urban metropolitan areas but also in tier-2 and tier-3 cities,” Sitharaman said.

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So far, 131.68 crore Aadhaar numbers have been issued to Indian citizens, she said. In 2021, UPI clocked transactions worth $940 billion, equivalent to 30% of India’s gross domestic product (GDP), the FM said, adding that in the five years since its launch, UPI has grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 160% in value terms, eclipsing all other payment forms. As of July 2022, there are 338 banks on UPI.

Sitharaman said the AA network is set to revolutionise credit flow towards medium and small industries, which need sustainable sources of finance. As of September 2022, within a year of the launch of the AA framework, 52 Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-regulated entities, including banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) have joined the AA network, she said. The total number of accounts enabled on the AA network stands at 1.1 billion.

“A wealth of opportunities lie there for the global fintech people to see what more can be done creatively if people are coming on board. Of course, the inclusive digital highway which is being created through Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN) taking the digital platforms, in the name of financial inclusion, and getting businesses to transact on them so that there is just going to be very high potential for the formalisation of the economy and the possibilities which emerge for fintech,” the finance minister said.