India’s National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) network, is in talks with Japan, Malaysia, and Bahrain to expand cross-border payments for the Indian diaspora, chief executive Dilip Asbe said.

Any rollout would require approvals from local governments and central banks, he said.

UPI already operates in nine countries, including Singapore, France, and the United Arab Emirates. It currently supports person-to-person remittances with Singapore and Nepal, and inward remittances from Greece.

The International Monetary Fund has called UPI the world’s largest real-time payment system by transaction volume.

India’s 35 million-strong diaspora sent home more than US$155 billion in remittances in the fiscal year ended March.

Asbe also said NPCI is exploring payments through ChatGPT and Gemini.

In October 2025, NPCI, OpenAI, and Razorpay piloted shopping and payments inside ChatGPT using two-factor pre-authorization, while NPCI kept payment data from AI companies.

Separately, India’s lower house approved a bill that would remove a bar on merchant discount rates for notified digital payments, including UPI, making such fees legally possible if the government permits them.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg