By Rishi Patel, Founder and CEO, Interpolitan Money
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has already answered a big question in payments around if people will change deeply ingrained financial habits if the alternative is genuinely faster, simpler and more accessible. UPI has become part of India’s everyday economic infrastructure, processing 23.6 billion transactions in July 2026 alone.
The scale of it matters, but the more important achievement is the behavioural effects. For millions of users, instant payment isn’t a big technological innovation anymore as it’s simply just how a payment should work. That shift in expectation is now beginning to shape cross-border finance too.
UPI’s Next Phase From Domestic Real-Time Payments to Cross-Border Infrastructure
The next challenge is extending the experience of real-time payments outside domestic borders. Businesses operate across several jurisdictions at once where suppliers might sit in Asia, with customers in Europe, investors in the Middle East and operating entities elsewhere. Yet moving money between those markets can still involve correspondent banking chains, foreign exchange conversion, different data standards, multiple compliance checks and limited visibility over where a payment is in the process.
A cross-border payment isn’t simply a domestic payment travelling a longer distance. It moves between different currencies, regulatory regimes, banking systems and approaches to financial crime prevention. That is why the defining issue for the next phase of real-time payments will be interoperability.
The Bank for International Settlements’ latest work on cross-border payments reaches a similar conclusion. Its 2026 monitoring work highlights interoperability by design, harmonised ISO 20022 implementation, standardised APIs and wider access to payment systems as important foundations for improving cross-border payments.The opportunity is not to create one rail that replaces every national system, but to make domestic systems communicate with one another far more effectively.
Global Lessons from India’s UPI Success
India’s most valuable payments export could ultimately be the architecture and principles behind UPI rather than UPI itself. Its success demonstrates what can happen when payment infrastructure is open enough for multiple institutions to participate, simple enough for users to adopt and trusted enough to operate at national scale.
That model is already influencing international payment connectivity. The Reserve Bank of India has been working bilaterally to link UPI with fast payment systems in other countries and has also joined Project Nexus, the BIS-led initiative designed to interlink domestic instant-payment systems through a common framework. Nexus is intended to avoid the need for a bespoke technical connection every time two national payment systems want to communicate.
For globally active businesses, this direction is important. The aim should be for an international payment to feel less like a sequence of separate banking events and more like one continuous transaction, while still respecting the legal and regulatory requirements of every jurisdiction involved.
Faster Decisions Still Need Human Context
AI is important in helping real-time payments be scalable, particularly in fraud detection, transaction monitoring and operational risk. Payments are getting faster and institutions have less time to identify anomalous behaviour before funds move. AI can analyse large volumes of activity and identify patterns at a pace no manual process can match.
However, automation can’t become a substitute for judgement. In cross-border finance, legitimate activity can look unusual when viewed without context. A complex ownership structure, a sudden change in transaction volume or a payment involving several jurisdictions may have a perfectly reasonable commercial explanation.
Decisions need to combine real time technology with experienced human oversight. The objective isn’t to remove scrutiny in pursuit of speed, it’s to remove unnecessary friction intelligently. Compliance should be designed into the infrastructure from the outset rather than bolted on after the payment journey has been built.
Tokenisation and Embedded Finance Will Change Where Payments Happen
Real time payments are also likely to become less visible to the end user. Embedded finance is moving payments, foreign exchange and treasury functions into the platforms where businesses already operate. Over time, more financial activity will happen inside accounting systems, marketplaces, treasury platforms and other enterprise workflows rather than through a separate banking interface.
Tokenisation could push this further by changing how assets and settlement instructions are represented and exchanged. The BIS’s Project Agora is exploring a multi-currency tokenised platform for wholesale cross-border payments, reflecting the wider industry interest in whether tokenisation can reduce some of the structural inefficiencies in correspondent banking.
Importantly though, new rails don’t remove old responsibilities. A tokenised transaction still needs clear ownership, liquidity, legal certainty, robust compliance and confidence in settlement. Innovation may change the mechanism through which value moves, but trust remains the essential infrastructure underneath it.
CBDCs and UPI Can Co-Exist in the Future of Instant Payments
CBDCs are sometimes framed as competitors to instant payment systems, but in practice co-existence is more likely. India has already introduced interoperability between the retail digital rupee pilot and UPI acceptance infrastructure, allowing CBDC users to make payments through existing UPI QR codes.
This points to an important principle for the future of money, that businesses and consumers generally care less about the rail behind a transaction than whether their funds are accessible, the payment works and the system can be trusted. CBDCs, instant payment systems, tokenised deposits and other forms of digital money could therefore operate alongside one another, provided they can interoperate effectively.
Real-Time Payment Fraud and Regulation
The greatest risk in the expansion of real time payments is assuming that faster automatically means better. Fraud moves quickly too. As instant payment networks become more interconnected, institutions will need stronger approaches to authentication, transaction monitoring, data protection and information sharing. NPCI continues to update UPI requirements in areas including safeguarding user information, underlining that security frameworks have to evolve with the scale of the network.
The cross-border dimension makes this harder because regulators have different rules, risk appetites and data requirements. The answer can’t be to weaken controls for the sake of speed. Equally, rebuilding layers of duplicated compliance would recreate the very friction that real-time infrastructure is meant to remove.
Moving forward, the next stage of evolution will need better coordination with common data standards, interoperable payment infrastructure, clearer regulatory frameworks and compliance that travels with the transaction as effectively as the payment data itself.
UPI’s success shows what happens when payment infrastructure becomes so convenient and trusted that users stop thinking about the infrastructure at all. The global opportunity is to bring that expectation to international finance.
Payments will need to move in a way that connects markets, currencies and regulatory systems while preserving the confidence of clients, institutions and regulators. That is the real promise of UPI 2.0, not just making payments faster, but making the global money movement feel as connected as the businesses and people it is designed to serve.
