Unified Payments Interface

Or maybe allow paying with what we have in India.

In India, we have this payment system called UPI.

which is really, really good.

It's been there for, I think, about 10 years or something.

Uh, second is on payment interoperability, right? So BRICS created, uh, something called the Payment Task Force, and their work is essentially to examine ways to increase interoperability between countries' payment systems.

Uh, so there's a technical report that came out last year, and the idea is that how do you make cross-border payment work faster, cheaper and more transparent? Uh, so in that sense, you know, UPI is now also going to be linked to Brazil's, uh, Pix system.

There's going to be SME lending, uh, with, uh, the SME financing facility that is backed by India's, uh, SIDBI and Exim Bank, and it's aimed at providing credit guarantees and digital lending infrastructure across member states.

Um, third, I think is, uh, related to this is, uh, more, um, is infrastructure finance, and I think you mentioned this mechanism, which is the BRICS Multilateral Guarantee mechanism, right? The BMG.

I was actually just going to go there.

Real-time payments is synonymous with UPI in India.

Sounds like it's completely transformed the day-to-day spending habits.

How else has UPI transformed the country?

I think UPS has been the biggest tailwind India's digital payments market has seen in the last 10 years.

And a lot of growth for companies like us has come because of that infrastructure being available.

I think I want to first talk about some of the amazing aspects of UPS.

It's this public-private partnership infrastructure that is built as a public rail whereby players like us can build on top of it to deliver the last mile.

Now, companies are already trying to remove that final handover.

Razorpay and the National Payments Corporation of India, or NPCI, have piloted purchases inside ChatGPT and Claude using UPI tools such as UPI Circle and Dezerv Pay.

Pine Labs has also built its own protocol on top of UPI, and Mastercard and Visa are building similar systems for card payments, while Google has proposed a broader standard called AP2.

Now, these are separate products, pilots, and protocols built by individual companies or partnerships, so India may now try to create a common framework across the UPI ecosystem.

Now, Reuters reported that NPCI is working on a unified agent protocol, or UAP.

This could give banks, merchants, payment apps, and AI agents a shared way to identify an agent, define what it may spend, record what it did, and decide who is responsible when something goes wrong.

Now, these systems didn't neatly replace one another.

Each removed a different piece of friction.

I would say India has been actually at the forefront of digital finance.

I really like what India has done on the back of Aadhaar, UPI and the India stack.

I think this is one area where entrepreneurship in India is actually thriving.

It has been more innovative than the rest of the world.

Because what India has done fundamentally is that it has approached digital pipes, which is through which information, financial information flows as a public infrastructure.

We have provided it through a public undertaking.

UPI is a payments utility.

And we have invested in that to create easy entry on the basis of common APIs that are part of the India stack into the fintech space.