Reportedly, India and Singapore have completed the technical preparations to link their fast payment systems. According to the ANI report, the payment systems Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and PayNow, may soon be used for money transfers between two countries, which will extensively help migrant workers.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), are working on associating UPI and PayNow, a project that is expected to be introduced very soon.
“Singapore wants to connect its PayNow with UPI and that project will finish sometime in the next few months when that happens anybody sitting in Singapore will be able to send money to their family members in India,” said P Kumaran, India’s High Commissioner in Singapore.
The representative told ANI that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to announce the project once it is formalized. PayNow is similar to RuPay, which is India’s payment network. It will benefit around 2 lakh workers who come to Singapore to work for brief periods.
“Most Indian tourists who come here do not have a RuPay card and even if they have it, they might have the domestic RuPay card so it is a bit complicated. So in future, we see a lot of people leaning to digitalisation not carrying a lot of cash, not dependent on international credit cards which have very high fees,” the Indian envoy further added.
