The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced that it will initiate a connection between India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) platform operated by the European Central Bank (ECB).
The RBI said the arrangement was made in agreement with the ECB and is intended to facilitate real-time cross-border remittances.
According to the ECB on November 20, 2025, its Governing Council approved the start of a “realisation phase” to link TIPS with UPI. The European apex bank added that it also continues to explore a potential connection with the Nexus Global Payments Ltd scheme.
Furthermore, the RBI and ECB highlighted the initiatives’ alignment with the G20’s roadmap for faster, cheaper and more transparent international payments.
UPI Linkages With Global Payment Systems
The first major real-time payment system-to-system linkage for UPI emerged in September 2021, when RBI and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced that India’s UPI would be linked with Singapore’s PayNow platform by July 2022.
Next, in March 2022, UPI’s international arm, NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL), signed a Memorandum of Understanding(MOU) with the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) to interlink UPI with the multi-currency cross-border platform Buna in the Arab region.
Meanwhile, merchant-level acceptance also expanded: in July 2024, NIPL announced a partnership with Network International for QR code-based UPI payments in the UAE.
And in October 2024, India and the UAE moved to interlink UPI with the UAE’s national payments platform AANI, supporting cross-border digital payments for over three million Indians in the Middle Eastern country.
In addition to the above-mentioned developments, UPI’s QR or merchant acceptance footprint now includes multiple other countries, including Bhutan, Nepal, Singapore, France, Maldives, Mauritius, and Qatar. Indian travellers or residents can use UPI QR codes for making payments in all these nations.
What Is TIPS?
TIPS is the Eurosystem’s instant-payments platform, launched in November 2018 to enable real-time settlement of electronic payments in central-bank money. It operates 24/7 on all days of the year, allowing payment-service providers across Europe to process transfers regardless of banking hours.
TIPS connects commercial banks and financial institutions within Europe through the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer framework, enabling participating entities to offer instant payments across borders within the Euro area. Notably, participants access TIPS through dedicated cash accounts held with their banks.
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The platform processes payments with extremely low latency: 99.99% of transactions settle in under five seconds, based on ECB data. Moreover, TIPS applies a uniform pricing structure, charging €0.002 per transaction, split equally between the sending and receiving institutions. The ECB also…
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