India Eyes UPI Expansion to More Countries, Focus on East

• India plans to expand UPI globally, with a focus on East Asia, after its success in driving nearly half of the country’s digital transactions
• UPI has scaled rapidly, crossing 21 billion transactions in December 2025, supported by financial inclusion under the Jan Dhan Yojana
• The government is also pushing to help micro-enterprises grow through better market access, productivity, and technology adoption

India is intensifying endeavors to scale up global presence of its own digital payments platform, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), while focusing particularly on the East Asian market, so affirmed Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju recently.

During the Global Inclusive Finance India Summit, Nagaraju mentioned UPI's Indian digital payment revolution and its present share of nearly 50 percent in the country's total digital transactions.

He indicated that the government would like to duplicate this success on the global stage by the increasing acceptance of UPI in more countries.

UPI is currently active in eight foreign countries—Bhutan, Singapore, Qatar, Mauritius, Nepal, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, and France—thus allowing Indian citizens, in the mentioned countries, to transact digitally without needing hard cash or international debit and credit cards.

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“We have already expanded to some countries and are trying to expand further. We are now focusing especially on East Asia”, Nagaraju said, underlining the government’s ambition to position UPI as a globally accepted payment platform.

Focusing on the domestic scale reached, he pointed out that in just one month, December 2025, UPI transactions surpassed 21 billion. He also mentioned that the fast digital payment growth had the support of bank account ownership expansion through the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana coupled with the rise in average account balances.

The UPI system is managed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which is in charge of India’s retail payment and settlement systems. NPCI operates with the backing of the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks’ Association.

In addition to digital payments, Nagaraju remarked about the hard times that Indian microenterprises are going through. Presently, there are millions of such units, yet progression into medium and large enterprises has been quite limited. He argued that this transition would need stronger support in the form of market access, productivity enhancement, and technology and hardware adoption.