Modi tells fintech to wire UPI into remittance corridors and rate consumer safety

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the seventh Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on 8 September that Unified Payments Interface should move from being live in 11 countries to being wired into those countries' own payment systems, starting with corridors where Indians work and trade. India has already linked UPI to Singapore's rails. The next list, he said, should be states with a large diaspora, high trade with India, or a government willing to plug the pipes together.

"This is essential because Indians work in large numbers in foreign countries. They are the largest remitters of money. A part of the remittances goes away as transaction costs; UPI can help in saving on these costs and the money can also reach families faster," he said. He added that global card payments still run on systems designed elsewhere and that India can now set its own rules and standards and connect them to the world.

The volume figures he used are the ones NPCI has been publishing. UPI completed ten years on 25 August. In August it handled more than 2,400 crore transactions. Modi said more than 50 lakh transactions would have cleared in the time he stood at the podium. Annual volume has gone from 1.78 crore in FY2016-17 to more than 24,162 crore in FY2025-26. Value has gone from Rs 0.07 trillion to about Rs 314 trillion.

He quoted French President Emmanuel Macron's line that UPI is a civilisational story as well as a technical one. Then he turned the brief away from payments. Fintech, he said, has to show the same speed in credit, insurance, savings, investments and pensions. He asked the industry to build a Fintech Consumer Protection Index that rates firms in public, and he said cybersecurity in India has to be "top notch." He also pointed to 7.8 percent GDP growth in April-June as a signal in a year of tariffs and broken supply lines.

The speech sat at the end of a day that began in Vadodara with project inaugurations worth more than Rs 35,000 crore, including Western Dedicated Freight Corridor sections. The Fest itself runs from 8 to 11 September at the Jio World Centre. Nirmala Sitharaman and state leaders are on the programme. Earlier preview copy treated the week as a coming attraction. Tuesday's text is the policy ask: remittance rails, a public safety score, and a push out of the payments silo.

Remittances are the hard edge. India is the world's largest recipient. Every percentage point taken as a fee is money that does not reach a household. Card networks and money-transfer operators still price those corridors. A UPI-to-local-rail link of the Singapore type is cheaper only if the other central bank and the other commercial banks agree to settle. Naming diaspora countries is easy. Signing the settlement memorandum is the work that NPCI and the finance ministry now have to show.

The Consumer Protection Index is the other concrete item. India already has an RBI ombudsman and a clutch of fintech rules. A named index would put a number on complaint rates, downtime and grievance time and hang it on every app store listing. Whether SEBI, RBI or a new body keeps the score was not said. The sentence is now on the record in front of the firms that would be scored.

A reader who saw the morning preview knows the venue and the guest list. The afternoon addition is the remittance test, the 11-country count, the August 2,400-crore print, the non-payments brief, and a consumer index that did not exist as a government ask when the hall opened.