New Delhi: The country’s largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) has announced that it has launched real-time payments system linkage between India and Singapore and vice-versa through SBI’s BHIM SBIPay mobile application.
The linkage will allow fund transfers from India to Singapore through registered mobile numbers and from Singapore to India using UPI ID, the bank said in a statement.
“The UPI-PayNow linkage is a significant milestone towards development of infrastructure for cross-border payments between India and Singapore. The initiative closely aligns with the G20’s priorities of driving faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border payments. The inward bilateral remittance between Singapore and India is around USD 949 Mn as of 2021 (as per World Bank Bilateral Remittance Matrix Dec ’22),” it added.
Shaktikanta Das, Governor, Reserve Bank of India, and Ravi Menon, Managing Director, Monetary Authority of Singapore executed the first live cross-border transaction. The RBI Governor Shri Shaktikanta Das used BHIM SBIPay for foreign inward remittance.
Dinesh Khara, Chairman, State Bank of India, expressed “We are glad to be associated with this path breaking initiative. This will go a long way in boosting the digitization initiatives of the Government and provide easy, seamless cross-border payment facility to the users.”
Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, with the Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong, launched the real-time payments system linkage between India and Singapore on February 21, 2023. UPI and PayNow (the online payment system of Singapore) will power this linking.
