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NPCI International Payments Ltd. (NIPL), the international arm of the National Payments Corporation of India, signed a commercial agreement on 30 August 2026 with the National Interbank Processing Centre JSC (NIPC), which operates Uzbekistan's national payment system HUMO.
The agreement lets Indian travellers scan Uzbekistan's national interoperable QR code, UZQR, using their existing UPI apps to make instant person-to-merchant payments across the country.
It was announced during the Prime Minister of India's bilateral visit to Uzbekistan, and follows formal approvals from the Reserve Bank of India and the Central Bank of Uzbekistan, which designated HUMO as NIPL's authorised partner for cross-border merchant acceptance.
Because UZQR is the Central Bank of Uzbekistan's mandated unified national QR infrastructure, integration with it gives UPI users near-universal acceptance across retail, hospitality and service merchants.
Indian tourists, business travellers and students will be able to pay directly from their Indian bank accounts, avoiding foreign-exchange markup and reducing reliance on international cards or cash.
The umbrella organisation for retail payments in India. It runs UPI, IMPS, RuPay, NACH, Bharat Bill Pay, the Aadhaar-enabled Payment System, FASTag and the Cheque Truncation System.
NPCI's wholly-owned international arm, created to take UPI and the RuPay card scheme to markets outside India — through direct acceptance deals, QR interoperability and by helping other countries build their own real-time payment systems.
The operator of HUMO, Uzbekistan's national payment system, and NIPL's counterparty in this agreement. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan designated HUMO as NIPL's authorised partner for cross-border merchant acceptance.
India's central bank and the regulator whose approval was required before the agreement could be executed. UPI's cross-border expansion runs on RBI clearances of this kind, paired with the counterpart central bank's.
A QR code at a shop counter is only useful if the payer's app can read it. Where every bank and wallet issues its own code, a foreign payment system has to strike a separate deal with each acquirer to reach merchants — slow, and it never gets to full coverage. A unified national QR standard mandated by the central bank collapses that problem: one integration reaches every merchant already displaying the national code. Uzbekistan's UZQR is such a standard, which is why a single NIPL-NIPC agreement produces what the release calls near-universal merchant acceptance rather than a pilot at selected outlets. India's own equivalent is BHIM UPI QR, and the same logic has driven UPI's other acceptance deals abroad. The commercial benefit for the traveller is that the payment settles from an Indian bank account through UPI rather than through an international card network, cutting out the foreign-exchange markup and the card interchange that ride on a card transaction.
Simple Analogy: Instead of getting a key cut for every shop in a city, you agree once with the city that all its locks will take one key — and your key already fits.
A real-time retail payment system built by NPCI that lets a user move money between bank accounts instantly from a mobile app, using a virtual payment address or a QR code rather than account numbers.
Key: Launched in 2016, it is the core of India's digital public infrastructure and the product NIPL exports. Its architecture allows any bank's account to be operated through any compliant app, which is what makes third-party app ecosystems and QR interoperability possible.
NPCI's domestic card scheme, created as an Indian alternative to international card networks for debit, credit and prepaid cards.
Key: It is the second product in NIPL's international mandate alongside UPI. RuPay card acceptance abroad and UPI QR acceptance abroad are separate arrangements, negotiated separately.
NPCI's own UPI application, launched to give users a reference app and to popularise UPI in its early years.
Key: The BHIM UPI QR standard is India's interoperable merchant QR code — the domestic counterpart of Uzbekistan's UZQR.
Uzbekistan sits at the centre of Central Asia, bordered by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan — every one of them landlocked. That makes Uzbekistan one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world, the other being Liechtenstein: to reach an ocean, goods must cross at least two national borders. Its two great rivers, the Amu Darya (the Oxus of classical geography) and the Syr Darya (the Jaxartes), rise in the eastern mountains and drain towards the Aral Sea; the Syr Darya is formed in the Fergana Valley by the confluence of the Naryn and the Kara Darya. Uzbekistan is a founding member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, established at Shanghai on 15 June 2001, and has hosted SCO summits at Tashkent and Samarkand. India and Uzbekistan declared a Strategic Partnership in 2011.
The release frames the agreement as advancing digital public infrastructure cooperation, not merely as a payments deal. UPI acceptance abroad has become a standard deliverable of Indian state visits, in the same category as fintech and connectivity agreements.
Cross-border retail payment links need approval from both central banks. Here the RBI cleared it on the Indian side and the Central Bank of Uzbekistan both cleared it and designated HUMO as NIPL's authorised partner — the same two-key pattern seen in UPI's other international arrangements.
The agreement covers person-to-merchant payments by Indian travellers in Uzbekistan. It is an outbound acceptance arrangement, not a remittance corridor — a distinction worth holding, since UPI internationalisation covers both kinds of arrangement and they are frequently confused.
Uzbekistan is a founding SCO member and part of the Central Asian region India engages through the India-Central Asia Dialogue and connectivity projects. India and Uzbekistan declared a Strategic Partnership in 2011.
General Awareness > Payment Systems, NPCI and Digital Banking
GS Paper 3 > Economy > Digital Payments; GS Paper 2 > India's Extended Neighbourhood
General Awareness > Economy and Current Affairs
UPI internationalisation appears in banking exam general awareness almost every cycle, and NPCI-related questions are a staple of IBPS, SBI and RBI Grade B papers.
NPCI International Payments Limited — NPCI's wholly-owned international arm, incorporated on 3 April 2020, which takes UPI and RuPay abroad.
Uzbekistan's mandated unified national interoperable QR code standard, set by the Central Bank of Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan's national payment system, operated by the National Interbank Processing Centre JSC (NIPC).
Person-to-merchant payment — a customer paying a shop, as distinct from a person-to-person transfer or a remittance.
A country surrounded entirely by landlocked countries; Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein are the only two.