UPI payments a welcome move for Australian NRIs

In a welcome move, Australia is one of ten countries from which Indian nonresidents will be able to transact using the UPI system.

Prevented earlier from using their overseas phone numbers to transact, now non-resident Indians from Singapore, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Oman, Qatar, USA, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom can pay for items using their non-resident external or ordinary accounts (NRE and NRO accounts. An NRE account helps NRIs transfer foreign earnings to India, while an NRO account helps them manage the income earned in India.)

Experts have welcomed this development lauding the simplicity of the new arrangements, saying that NRIs will just need to link their NRE and NRO accounts linked to their international SIM to UPI and use it like any other Indian UPI user for merchant payment as well as peer-to-peer payments.

If you’ve just returned from your India holiday, you may have experienced the inconvenience of having to use cash out at the shops.

Or become the butt of jokes as retailers stared at you for being ‘outdated’.

(Twitter user Amit Paranjpe of Pune tweeted recently: Peak NRI season here. How do you spot NRIs at a Mall FoodCourt? No, not the usual differences in clothing, etc. Notice how they are the only ones paying with cash!)

The Germany-based Twitter user Aditya replied, “Guilty as charged! Tried to set up PayTM and failed. Was pleasantly surprised how most shops reacted with surprise when I wanted to pay by cash. In Germany cash is still the default option”.

UPI, a six-year-old payments network built by a coalition of banks, has taken much of the country by storm, becoming the most popular way Indians transact online today. The payments service fetches money directly from banks, removing the reliance on any intermediary. With its low cost of transaction, UPI payments such as PayTM are used by everyday vendors from roadside juice sellers to Uber drivers.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) have however cautioned member banks to ensure such types of accounts are only allowed as per the extant FEMA regulations and adherence to the guidelines issued by the concerned regulatory departments of Reserve Bank of India.

Member banks also need to guarantee all the necessary Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/ Combating of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) checks and compliance validation/account level validations are met.

This new move has been welcomed by NRIs as it eases the burden of carrying cash during their visits to India.

Pawan Luthra