The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is in the final leg of simplifying the KYC process for its UPI One World service, which is meant to enable UPI payments for foreigners visiting India, two people in the know said.
The retail payment network has sought Reserve Bank of India’s approval for this facility, after running a pilot successfully for visitors from 40 countries in the recently concluded India AI Impact Summit.
As of now international travellers need to undergo a physical KYC verification process to be able to avail themselves of the UPI payment service. NPCI is trying to smoothen the process, these people said.
“NPCI is awaiting a nod from the Reserve Bank of India to take the simplified KYC process live for visitors to India,” said one of the people.
NPCI did not respond to a request for comment.
The UPI One World feature was launched in 2023 at the G20 Summit. Eventually it was extended for all inbound travellers. However, the feature faced challenges because of the mandate to collect a physical KYC copy of the customer. This meant that fintech startups that offered the service had to deploy feet-on-street, an expensive proposition.
The person cited earlier said as per the revised process, after entering India people with international bank accounts would need to download an application, register themselves and upload scanned copies of their passports for KYC.
Limited adoption of the feature was mainly because of the need for a physical check, the second person said. There was a proposal with the NPCI to enable digital KYC for the customer onboarding process. Finally, NPCI piloted the feature at the AI Summit and is now awaiting final RBI nod to take it live.
ET first reported on December 19, 2024 that NPCI was evaluating smoothening the customer onboarding process and the features for UPI One World payments.
Currently, foreign visitors are allowed to do UPI payments for merchant transactions but cannot do person-to-person transactions. That has emerged as a growth challenge as well, given a lot of micro merchants actually use their personal bank accounts to accept UPI payments. In such cases, transactions fail.
“There has been hardly any movement on the P2P payments being enabled on UPI for foreigners, but at least a digitised KYC can actually help smoothen the onboarding journey and solve one pain point,” said the second person.
UPI One World is facilitated by Pine Labs, Transcorp, Tri O Tech Solutions that runs the Fampay app, Smart Payment Solutions and Payworld.
UPI is becoming the de-facto merchant payment mode in the country. In January 2026, NPCI settled 21 billion UPI payments for a total value of Rs 28.3 lakh crore.
