UPI-Aani

Overview

The UPI-Aani Linkage is an agreed interlinking of India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with the UAE's national Instant Payment Platform, Aani, to enable real-time cross-border payments and remittances between the two countries [1][2]. It is paired with a separate but complementary agreement to interlink India's RuPay card network with the UAE's domestic card scheme JAYWAN [1][2]. The arrangement rests on a July 2023 memorandum of understanding between the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE), and a formal agreement signed during PM Narendra Modi's UAE visit on 13 February 2024 [2]. The corpus documents Aani as the UAE's national instant payment platform (launched October 2023, operated by CBUAE subsidiary Al Etihad Payments) with a planned UPI link [[../countries/AE-uae.md]].

History

In July 2023 the RBI and the CBUAE signed a memorandum of understanding to interlink their payments infrastructure, agreeing to cooperate on connecting India's UPI with the UAE's Instant Payment Platform, Aani [2]. A formal agreement to this effect was signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the UAE on 13 February 2024, witnessed alongside UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan [1][2]. The two governments committed to interlinking the national platforms — UPI (India) and Aani (UAE) — and, in parallel, to linking the RuPay and JAYWAN card networks [1][2]. Aani is operated by Al Etihad Payments, a CBUAE subsidiary, and went live as the UAE's national instant payment platform in October 2023 [[../countries/AE-uae.md]].

Technical specification

Linkage model. The agreement covers interlinking the two national fast payment systems — UPI and Aani — to enable seamless real-time cross-border transactions [1][2]. (As of the February 2024 agreement, detailed message-level, identifier, and QR specifications had not been published.)

Card-network leg. Separately, RuPay (India) is to be interlinked with JAYWAN (UAE) to enable universal acceptance of RuPay cards across the UAE; the RuPay card stack was shared with Al Etihad Payments to help the UAE build sovereign card infrastructure [1][2]. Aani itself supports QR-based payments in the UAE [[../countries/AE-uae.md]].

Use cases

• Cross-border remittances. The linkage is aimed at real-time cross-border remittance for the large Indian community in the UAE — estimated at around 3.5 million resident Indian nationals — making the corridor strategically significant [2].
• Travel and card acceptance. The parallel RuPay-JAYWAN link is intended to give RuPay cardholders broad acceptance across the UAE, complementing the account-to-account Aani connection [1][2].

Implementations

The arrangement is institutional. Principal parties are the RBI and the CBUAE (and its subsidiary Al Etihad Payments, operator of Aani), with NPCI providing the RuPay card stack [1][2][[../countries/AE-uae.md]]. Specific participating banks and consumer apps for the UPI-Aani leg had not been enumerated in the sources reviewed [1][2]. The UAE corpus notes all major UAE banks were integrating Aani and lists the India UPI link as planned [[../countries/AE-uae.md]].

Comparison

UPI-Aani most closely resembles UPI-PayNow (India–Singapore) in ambition — a two-way account-to-account connection between two national instant payment systems addressing a major remittance corridor — but, unlike PayNow, it was not yet live at the time of the reviewed sources and adds a distinctive card-network leg (RuPay-JAYWAN) absent from the PayNow arrangement [1][2]. It differs from the merchant-QR acceptance models of UPI-LankaQR and UPI-KHQR, which target Indian tourists scanning foreign merchant QRs rather than bidirectional remittance [1][2]. It is a bilateral RBI-CBUAE arrangement rather than a multilateral Nexus Global Payments membership, and narrower than the euro-area-wide UPI-TIPS settlement initiative [2].

Fun facts

• The deal bundles two distinct payment rails — the UPI-Aani instant-payment link and the RuPay-JAYWAN card link — into a single India-UAE interoperability package [1][2].
• India's RuPay card stack was shared with Al Etihad Payments to help the UAE become sovereign in digital payments, mirroring how UPI/Bakong-style stacks have been exported elsewhere [2].

Status

Announced / in development. The enabling MoU was signed in July 2023 and the formal interlinking agreement on 13 February 2024; the UAE corpus lists the UPI-Aani link as planned with Aani live since October 2023 [1][2][[../countries/AE-uae.md]]. No full consumer go-live date for the UPI-Aani leg appears in the sources reviewed.

Sources

1 India-UAE MoUs Link UPI With UAE's AANI For Instant Payment — Adda247 Current Affairs, 2024 2 Now, UPI To Be Linked With UAE's Instant Payments Platform AANI — Inc42, 2024 3 Enabling Infrastructure build and Interoperability of payment systems between India-UAE — Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 2024 4 UPI poised for widespread adoption in UAE as QR code payments become mainstream — DD News, 2024

Deployments

No country reports mention this standard by name.

Regions / aggregations not mapped to a single country

• India–UAE