India and Russia will explore the potential of accepting RuPay and Mir cards in each other’s countries to facilitate payments in the midst of Western sanctions on Moscow. During the high-level Internal Governmental Commission meeting on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological, and Cultural Cooperation (IRIGC-TEC), both countries talked about and decided to investigate the possibility of accepting these cards.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov co-chaired the meeting. They decided to check out the feasibility of a collaboration between the National Payment Corporation of India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the Bank of Russia’s Faster Payments System (FPS). With the mutual adoption of RuPay (India) and Mir cards (Russia), Indian and Russian people would be able to make hassle-free payments in their respective nations in Indian rupees and Russian rubles.
Both leaders concurred to consider using the Bank of Russia’s Services Bureau of Financial Messaging System for payments between countries. Currently, the SWIFT network is used for payments between India and Russia, which is the network for international financial networks. However, with sanctions in place, exploring an alternative method of cross-border payment has become necessary.
The meeting also discussed the recent launch of the cross-border connectivity between India’s UPI and Singapore’s PayNow.
It should be noted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently started an international connection between UPI and PayNow. People in both nations may now conduct faster and more cost-effective digital transactions thanks to India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Singapore’s PayNow.
The PayNow-UPI linkage is the world’s first real-time payment systems linkage, which uses a scalable cloud-based infrastructure that can accommodate future increases in the volume of remittance traffic.
Since its inception in 2016, the UPI has emerged as the most popular and favoured payment channel, pioneering person-to-person and person-to-merchant transactions, accounting for 75% of all digital payments.
From 0.45 crore in January 2017 to 804 crore in January 2023, the volume of UPI transactions has surged massively. During the same time period, the value of UPI transactions increased from Rs 1,700 crore to Rs 12.98 lakh crore.
