India's UPI Expands Globally: Japan To Trial Unified Payments For Indian Tourists

New Delhi: India’s QR‑code payment network, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), is expanding beyond its borders, with Japan among countries trialling the system to serve growing numbers of Indian tourists, a report has said.

The report from Nikkei Asia said that Japanese IT services company NTT Data is partnering with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to run a trial in Japan in FY26 that would let Indian tourists pay with UPI and have their Indian bank accounts debited.

"The companies are considering ways to connect Japanese and Indian payment networks," the report said.

The move aims to capture a surging number of Indian tourists as Japan received about 3.15 lakh visitors from India in 2025, up 35 per cent year‑on‑year.

McKinsey has projected the number of outbound trips from India rising from 13 million in 2022 to 90 million in 2040, as growing middle-class incomes fuel an appetite for foreign trips, the report said.

UPI, launched in 2016 as a government‑led initiative, has become part of everyday life and allows a single QR code to be used by major payment applications.

UPI transactions rose 42 per cent in fiscal 2024 to 185.8 billion, and an IMF report in June 2025 called it the “world’s largest real‑time payment system.”

NPCI and the Indian government have exported UPI to eight countries since 2021, including Bhutan, Singapore, France, Sri Lanka and the UAE, and are helping nations such as Peru and Namibia develop similar rails.

The report noted UPI’s rapid domestic adoption was driven by its shared‑platform design as well as banks and fintech companies developing their payment apps with UPI as a common standard.

UPI accounted for 58 per cent of in-store payments in India in 2024 and set to rise to 76 per cent in 2030, when cash transactions could fall from 15 per cent to 7 per cent, according to US payments company Worldpay.

NTT Data, likely to promote UPI to Japanese merchants, already offers payment terminals for businesses in India and Southeast Asia with around 6 million Indian stores, including e-commerce businesses, using its services.

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