UPI in 40 countries: what's actually live, and what's still a press release

Last month, NPCI launched UPI One World at the India AI Impact Summit, letting delegates from over 40 countries pay at QR codes across India. A week earlier, another headline declared UPI accepted in 22 international markets. The week before that, a travel blog listed 17 countries where Indian tourists can pay with PhonePe.

All of these numbers are correct. None of them are talking about the same thing.

NPCI's international expansion is three separate products that share a name and a logo. Conflating them produces press releases that read well and travel guides that mislead. If you want to know whether you can pay for groceries in Singapore with your UPI app, the answer depends on which of the three UPIs you're asking about.

"40 countries" means three different products

The UPI international story bundles three distinct products into one narrative:

Outbound UPI: Indians using their Indian bank's UPI app at merchants outside India. This is the product most travelers want when they search 'does UPI work abroad'.

UPI One World: A prepaid rupee wallet for foreign visitors coming to India. This is what the AI Summit announcement described: 40 nationalities whose passport holders could load rupees and scan QR codes at Indian merchants. It is an inbound tourism product, not a product for Indians paying abroad.

UPI-PayNow remittances: A direct bank-to-bank linkage between India and Singapore, enabling real-time cross-border transfers between UPI-linked Indian accounts and PayNow-enabled Singaporean ones. A money-transfer product used primarily by NRIs and the Indian diaspora.

Most 'UPI in X countries' headlines refer to Outbound UPI. Most 'UPI for 40 countries' headlines refer to UPI One World. Country counts are never consistent across articles because the authors are not measuring the same thing.

Where Indians can actually pay abroad

As of mid-2026, Outbound UPI has signed agreements covering roughly 15 countries through NPCI International. Of those, merchant coverage is meaningful (more than a handful of tourist hotspots) in about seven to eight.

UAE is the most mature outbound market. Dubai Mall and Abu Dhabi's major retail chains accept UPI. Lulu Hypermarket, the Indian-community retail anchor in both cities, has had UPI since 2022. What doesn't work: most local taxis, smaller restaurants outside tourist corridors, petrol stations outside the major chains.

Nepal and Bhutan have near-total acceptance in urban centres. These were NPCI's earliest international markets and benefit from deep financial integration with India's banking system. For most daily transactions in Kathmandu or Thimphu, UPI works.

Mauritius offers broad acceptance at tourist-facing businesses. The Bank of Mauritius backed the integration early; acceptance at hotels, restaurants, and retail in Port Louis is reliable.

Malaysia, Oman, and Sri Lanka have working UPI at Indian-community merchants, major malls, and tourist venues. Merchant density outside those zones is thin. You will find working QR codes at the places Indian tourists congregate; you will not reliably find them at the next street over.

France is effectively a pilot. Selected merchants in Paris's tourist zones (around the main shopping streets and the Eiffel Tower vicinity) accept UPI. Coverage outside Paris is close to zero.

Japan, Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan), Vietnam, and Qatar have signed agreements. Functional QR codes are rare. These countries are at the beginning of the merchant-adoption curve; the agreement stage precedes usable coverage by two to three years.

UPI One World: the inbound product that reads as global

UPI One World solves a real problem for India's inbound tourism: foreign visitors can't use UPI because they don't have Indian bank accounts. The product fixes this by creating a prepaid rupee wallet that any visitor can fund using an international card.

The mechanics: a traveler gets their passport verified at an authorized point, loads up to ₹50,000 per month onto a UPI-linked wallet, and scans the same QR codes that every UPI app uses across India. At the end of the visit, unspent balance returns to the original payment source.

NPCI has run One World pilots at several events: the G20 in 2023, the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2023, and now the AI Impact Summit in 2026. The 40-country figure from the AI Summit refers to the nationalities of delegates who used the product, not countries where the product is deployed.

The product genuinely works well for what it is. Foreign visitors at a Bengaluru restaurant can now pay by scanning a QR code instead of hunting for rupee cash. For India's tourism sector, that's a real improvement. What it doesn't change: where Indians can pay abroad.

The PayNow linkage: the most mature model

The UPI-PayNow integration between India and Singapore, launched in February 2023, is the technically deepest cross-border UPI implementation in existence. It's also the clearest model for what NPCI International wants to build elsewhere.

The linkage lets an Indian UPI user send money directly to any Singapore PayNow-linked bank account, without converting to a foreign wallet, through a real-time bank-to-bank settlement. The rupees leave the sender's Indian account; Singapore dollars arrive in the recipient's Singaporean account in seconds. As of mid-2026, 19 Indian banks support this.

For merchant payments in Singapore, the same linkage applies: merchants displaying a PayNow QR code can receive payment from a UPI app. This includes tourist venues at Marina Bay Sands, retail chains in Orchard Road, and shops in Little India that have actively promoted it.

What doesn't work in Singapore: hawker centre individual stalls (most don't take PayNow separately), MRT top-ups, taxis outside ride-hailing apps, and smaller neighbourhood shops outside the Indian-community belt. The limiting factor isn't the linkage; it's PayNow merchant adoption in Singapore more broadly, which is still not universal.

NPCI International is pursuing similar bank-network linkages with Faster Payments in the UK and Interac in Canada. Based on the India-Singapore timeline (agreement signed late 2021, live February 2023, 19 banks supported by 2026), expect live remittance transfers to UK and Canada accounts sometime in 2026 or 2027. Merchant acceptance will follow on a slower curve.

Why none of this helps for B2B payments

Everything above is consumer infrastructure: merchant QR codes, prepaid wallets, person-to-person transfers. For a business receiving payment from an international customer, none of it applies.

An Indian SaaS company invoicing a Singapore client cannot use UPI. A Bengaluru consultancy receiving payment from a UAE company still goes through SWIFT wire transfers. A freelancer getting paid from a UK client uses Wise, Stripe, or Razorpay's international products.

The gap is structural. UPI's cross-border integrations are built on consumer rails: QR codes at point of sale, small-value person-to-person transfers. Business payments need invoice references, larger transaction limits, reconciliation-friendly settlement, and KYC requirements built for company accounts rather than individuals. NPCI's current international architecture doesn't address any of these.

Whether NPCI builds a B2B cross-border product is an open question. The domestic Account Aggregator and OCEN frameworks address some B2B frictions inside India. Cross-border business payments require a different kind of bilateral agreement with correspondent banks and payment networks in each country, which is significantly more complex than the consumer QR-code approach.

What will unlock the next 15 countries

Three factors determine how quickly a country moves from 'signed agreement' to 'actually works daily':

First, a compatible fast payment network. The India-Singapore integration works because PayNow is a real-time payment system that NPCI could connect to directly. Countries without an equivalent (cash-heavy economies, those with fragmented banking infrastructure) will see much slower rollouts regardless of agreements signed.

Second, a meaningful Indian diaspora or merchant base. Nepal and the UAE moved fastest because the communities that wanted to pay and receive UPI payments were already large. The Central Asian markets have the agreement but not the demand density.

Third, regulatory appetite. Some central banks have been slow to approve cross-border real-time payments even when the technical integration exists. The UK and Canada have both: established fast payment networks (Faster Payments, Interac), large Indian communities, and regulators who have already approved the framework. These are the next two markets likely to reach Singapore-level integration.

NPCI International's stated target is 20+ countries with meaningful coverage by FY29. For the announced-but-thin markets, that timeline means another two to three years of merchant adoption work after the initial integration. For UK and Canada, the remittance product could arrive as soon as late 2026; merchant coverage will take longer.

For now, the useful frame is this: Nepal and Bhutan work. UAE works for tourist-facing merchants. Singapore works for both merchant payments and bank transfers. Everything else is in progress, and the progress is genuine — just measured in years, not press releases.