Guwahati: The link between Singapore’s PayNow and India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was officially opened on Tuesday by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Customers of the partnering financial institutions in Singapore and India will be able to instantly transfer money between bank accounts or electronic wallets in the two nations.
Only the mobile phone number, UPI identity or Virtual Payment Address(VPA) is required for them to carry out this action. Customers can now send money across international borders in a secure, convenient and affordable method thanks to the linkage.
Prime minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong and Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India presided over the launch. Live cross-border fund transfers were carried out between the RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das and MAS Managing Director Ravi Menon from their respective locations in Singapore and India.
The PayNow-UPI linkage uses a scalable cloud-based infrastructure that can handle future growth in the amount of remittance traffic making it the first real-time payment systems linkage of its kind in the world. The participation of a non-bank financial institution makes it the first linkage to do so.
In a staged approach, DBS Bank and Liquid Group will gradually raise the number of eligible user groups and transaction limits from now through the end of March 2023 before making the service available to Singapore clients.
All partnering Indian banks’ Indian customers would be able to use the service to receive money right away. At the time of debut, sending of funds is only available to users of four Indian banks; however, this scope will be progressively enlarged.
In order to provide low-cost cross-border remittances to and from foreign employees and students living in Singapore and India, participating financial institutions have pledged to making sure the service is affordable and available to them.
Additionally, for increased efficiency, the interface enables the automatic implementation of capital control requirements. In order to gradually grow the linkage, MAS and RBI will increase both the number of cooperating financial institutions and the applicable use cases.