On Thursday 16 June 2022, the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) announced that NPCI International has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with France-based payment solutions provider Lyra Network to accept RuPay cards and UPI payments in France. RuPay cards and UPI (Unified Payments Interface) services will be available in France soon.
France and India’s trade stood at EUR 8.9 billion in FY17. India-France bilateral trade, excluding military equipment, grew by 39.17% to EUR 12.58 billion in 2021, while India’s exports to France grew by 39.36% to EUR 6.70 billion in 2021, according to government data.
India is doing 5.5 billion UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transactions every month and crossed the 500 crore mark for the first time in March 2022. NPCI is working towards the target of UPI transactions of 1000 million dollars every day till FY25.
According to NPCI data, UPI has 26 crore unique users and 50 million merchants and in May 2022 there were 323 banks available in UPI through which about 5.9552 billion transactions worth Rs 10415.20 billion were done.
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There are more than 80 crore ATM card holders in India and UPI transactions doubled on a year-on-year basis and crossed the transaction mark of Rs 10 trillion in May 2022.
In May 2021, 224 banks were available in UPI (Unified Payments Interface) through which about 2.5396 billion transactions worth Rs 4906.38 billion were done.
India’s UPI has been accepted by many countries including Singapore, UAE (United Arab Emirates), Bhutan, Nepal, France, Malaysia, Japan, etc.
UPI was launched in the UAE in April 2022 in partnership with NEOPAY, a payments subsidiary of Mashreq Bank. Nepal adopted UPI in March 2022.
Credit card bills will also be able to pay with UPI as on Wednesday RBI (Reserve Bank of India) allowed the linking of credit cards with UPI, earlier only debit cards linked to savings or current accounts could be linked to UPI.
According to Reserve Bank of India data, in the year 2021-22, there were 45956 million transactions through UPI, 3939 million through debit cards, and 2240 million through credit cards.
France has become the first European country to accept UPI and RuPay card payments and Bhutan is the first country to adopt India’s UPI standard.
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