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15 March 2023
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PhonePe is in India what TWINT is in Switzerland: the most popular mobile payment app in the country. It is one of over 60 mobile applications available in the Indian banking sector and the state’s real-time payments infrastructure, Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Besides domestic apps, Google Pay and Amazon Pay are also vying for their share of the market, though Apple Pay is not. In December 2022 alone, UPI processed over 7.8 billion transactions from 260 million people. That sounds like a huge number. However, the perspective changes when we compare these figures to Switzerland; while around 20% of the Indian population uses UPI, TWINT reaches well over half of the Swiss population.
India also wants to expand its open-source infrastructure abroad. In recent months, their subsidiary company has concluded a number of agreements with foreign partners. Stakeholders from around 30 countries have already expressed interest in UPI. The latest partnership was formed last October with Worldline, the European leader in payment and transaction services, which holds a 20% share in TWINT. The goal is to gain acceptance for UPI as a payment infrastructure in Europe. Its target markets include Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Similar collaborations already exist with UPI in the United Kingdom and France. Cooperation between India and Singapore goes even further. Their central banks have announced plans to link their real-time payment infrastructures.
On the one hand, the aim is to ensure that the growing number of Indian tourists are able to pay quickly and efficiently while in Singapore. On the other hand, UPI is designed to facilitate money transfers for the 32 million Indians living abroad, both in terms of real-time capability and cost. Recently, the Indian government confirmed that this “digital public good” would remain free for all users.
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