Payments major PhonePe has tied up with Sri Lanka's LankaPay to enable payments using India's UPI infrastructure in an effort to boost its presence in the country, along with easing payments for Indian travellers to the island nation.
LankaPay is the National Payments Council of India-equivalent for Sri Lanka and operates a national payment network in the country. NPCI is the body in India that operates UPI.
PhonePe's app users, which currently stand at roughly 50 crore, can now make payments using UPI in Sri Lanka across over 4 lakh LankaPayQR merchants, marking a convenient alternative to cash, credit and debit cards, and forex cards.
"The building blocks are in place now. It's all about extrapolating and building more use cases on top of it and driving adoption and usage," said Ritesh Pai, chief executive officer, International Payments, PhonePe. "I'm pretty confident that in the next 8–12 months, we'll see a sizeable traction as far as digital payments are concerned in Sri Lanka."
A QR code-based payment system, compared to an Android POS, is very cost-efficient and can bring in "virality," he said.
Sri Lanka is now the sixth country where PhonePe has enabled UPI payments. The system is already active in Nepal, Bhutan, Mauritius, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. By the second half of this year, PhonePe should have added Qatar, Thailand, Indonesia, UK and the US as well, Pai said.
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