A payments rail built so Indian tourists could pay for lunch in Kathmandu is now moving disaster relief money into Nepal.
The Embassy of Nepal in India has encouraged Indian users donating to the country’s Prime Minister Disaster Relief Fund to activate the international payments feature on their UPI apps, marking what is likely the first use of UPI International for a foreign government’s relief appeal.
It also marks a shift in how UPI International is being used. Until now, the network’s cross-border use case has largely been built around Indians travelling overseas and paying local merchants. The Nepal relief appeal opens it up to users who may never leave India.
India’s UPI International stands alongside Chinese payment methods such as Alipay+ and UnionPay to facilitate cross-border donations to the disaster-hit country.
Even as cross-border acceptance grows for use cases beyond tourism and convenience, an industry source said it was also necessary to keep a tab on potential fraud.
Donors are required to switch on the UPI International feature on their digital payments apps to transact using an authorised online payment gateway listed by the Government of Nepal. Once activated for a particular country, Indian users can transact in the country for a week. Users see the amount converted from Indian rupees to Nepalese rupees as they punch it in.
“Friends and well-wishers in India who are encountering difficulty while contributing to the Prime Minister Disaster Relief Fund of the Government of Nepal by scanning the designated QR codes are kindly requested to activate “UPI International” in their UPI/banking application before proceeding with the payment,” the Embassy of Nepal in India said in a post on social media platform X.
The call for donations comes amid devastating flash floods in Nepal that have claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with about 4,000 people, including locals and tourists, remaining missing. The floods were triggered last week near the Nepal-Tibet border.
“For UPI International under NIPL to be placed alongside established rails like Alipay and UnionPay shows that scale and trust are starting to translate into global acceptance, not just domestic dominance. What stands out is that a foreign entity is choosing to collect through UPI rather than traditional banking channels, a use case we expect to grow as global organisations recognise that offering UPI as a collection option makes them easier to pay into,” said Ashwin Bhatnagar, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of Xflow, a cross-border fintech in India.
UPI International is an initiative by NPCI International Payments (NIPL) to globalise India’s real-time payments system. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) operates the UPI network.
In March 2024, NIPL and Nepal’s largest payment network, Fonepay Payment Service, went live with cross-border UPI payments between the two countries. UPI crossed the 1 lakh transaction mark within six months of acceptance in Nepal in August 2024.
The first phase covered QR code-based person-to-merchant transactions; an Indian visitor in the Himalayan country could scan a Fonepay QR code and pay from an Indian bank account in rupees, with the Nepali merchant credited in Nepalese rupees.
“This is a meaningful marker for UPI’s journey outside India. UPI International has largely been seen as a convenience for outbound tourists and NRIs. The Nepal Embassy listing it alongside Alipay and UnionPay for PM Disaster Relief Fund donations is different: it’s UPI being recognised as a legitimate inbound collection rail by a foreign government,” added Bhatnagar.
Other payment methods accepted on the Government of Nepal Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund include debit and credit cards on Visa and Mastercard for international users.
UPI is accepted in other countries such as France, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bhutan, Cambodia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Mauritius, with deployments under way in other regions.
