India and Singapore will link their respective high-speed payment systems (Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and PayNow) to allow users to make instant, low-cost remittances to each other, the Reserve Bank said Tuesday.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have announced a project to link high-speed payment systems. The RBI said in a statement that the partnership aims to be operational by July 2022.

“UPI-PayNow linkage allows each user of two high-speed payment systems to make instant, low-cost transfers to and from each other without having to join another payment system.”

The RBI said that the UPI-PayNow partnership is an important milestone in the development of infrastructure for cross-border payments between India and Singapore, crossing borders faster, cheaper and more transparent. He said it is closely aligned with the G20’s financial inclusion priority of promoting payments.

This linkage is an early stage of NPCI International Private Limited (NIPL) and Network for Electronic Transfers (NETS) to promote cross-border interoperability of card and QR code payments between India and Singapore. It is based on an effort.

This will further establish the flow of trade, travel and remittance between the two countries.

This initiative is also in line with RBI’s vision to identify cross-border inbound remittance corridors and fees as outlined in Payment Systems Vision Document 2019-21.

Here, UPI is a mobile-based high-speed payment system that allows you to make instant payments 24 hours a day using a customer-created virtual payment address (VPA). This eliminates the risk of the sender sharing bank account details. UPI supports both Person-to-Person (P2P) and Person-to-Merchant (P2M) payments, allowing users to send or receive money.

PayNow is Singapore’s fast payment system, enabling peer-to-peer money transfer services available to individual customers through Singapore’s participating banks and non-bank financial institutions (NFIs).

This allows users to send and receive instant funds from one bank or electronic wallet account in Singapore to another bank using only their mobile number, Singapore NRIC / FIN, or VPA.