KUALA LUMPUR: Financial safeguards will be in place when India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system is introduced in Malaysia, says India’s External Affairs Ministry Secretary (East) P. Kumaran.
He said the safeguards will be directly built into the system to ensure that UPI is not abused by unintended parties.
“UPI’s introduction is mainly to help tourists who shop in partner countries, and makes it easier for workers from both countries to send their remittances back to their home countries.
“As such, safeguards will be built into it to make sure that it is only meant to address people who actually need this.
“Initially, the plan had some restrictions on the amounts that could be transferred,” he told a press briefing yesterday in conjunction with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official two-day visit to Malaysia here.
Kumaran added that there is currently no timeline for the introduction of UPI to Malaysia due to various complicated technical steps that need to be completed first.
“We will first have to bring multiple banks on board with UPI in both countries, followed by some kind of software alignment.
“A number of point-of-sale machines will also need to developed for UPI, alongside establishing collaboration with merchants in both countries so that tourists and other visitors can take advantage of UPI,” he said.
The move comes after Modi announced during a reception here on Saturday that India’s UPI system will enter the Malaysian market, as Malaysia and India seek to deepen their longstanding economic ties.
Regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, UPI is a real-time digital payment system that enables instant peer-to-peer and person-to-merchant transactions directly by linking user bank accounts to the UPI application on their phone.
It does this by allowing payments to be made to other user-created Virtual Payment Address, phone number or QR code without the need to share any bank account details.
It is developed and operated by the National Payments Corporation of India.
The whole payment process is secured through two-factor authentication.
As of 2025, UPI stands as the largest retail fast-payment system globally, handling over 640 million transactions daily, accounting for nearly half of global real-time digital payment transactions while also outperforming other traditional platforms like Visa in volume.
