India and the UAE are set to interlink UPI and AANI to facilitate seamless cross-border transactions.

Banking & Finance

The Government of India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are working to connect India's Unified Payment Interface (UPI) with the UAE's instant payments platform AANI. This will facilitate seamless cross-border transactions between the two countries.


      - The meeting was co-chaired by Union Minister Piyush Goyal, Minister of Commerce & Industry (MoCI), Government of India (GoI), and His Highness Sheikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Managing Director (MD) of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).

      - The representatives from both governments also agreed to collaborate on a card payment service using resources from India’s National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) through its international subsidiary NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) in partnership with the UAE's payments entity Al Etihad Payments (AEP). This will enable the creation of the domestic card scheme JAYWAN in the UAE.

      - The UAE has also agreed to invest in establishing food parks across India, with an anticipated investment of approximately USD 2 billion over the next two to two-and-a-half years.

Main Points:-   (i) This initiative will benefit over 3 million Indians living in the UAE, allowing them to utilize the advantages of UPI and AANI.

      (ii) This was discussed during the 12th Meeting of the India-UAE High Level Joint Task Force on Investments (HLJTFI) held in Mumbai, Maharashtra.

(iii) - This scheme is based on the RuPay card stack, which was developed and deployed on a large scale by NPCI in India. It will be shared with AEP to help the UAE become sovereign in the field of digital payments.

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