UPI-Nepal

Overview

The UPI-Nepal Linkage is a cross-border merchant-acceptance connection that lets travellers from India pay Nepalese merchants using their familiar Unified Payments Interface (UPI) apps. It is operated by NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) — the international arm of India's National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) — in partnership with Fonepay Payment Service Ltd., Nepal's largest payment network [1][2]. An Indian user scans a Fonepay QR code displayed at a Nepalese point of sale; the transaction is initiated in Indian rupees and converted instantly into Nepalese rupees for the merchant [1]. It supports person-to-merchant (P2M) QR transactions only, not personal/individual bank QRs [1]. The arrangement was billed as the first time UPI was enabled for P2M QR-based transactions outside India in a full-scale commercial deployment [1]. Within the project corpus, Nepal's report records the India-UPI corridor as active from March 2024 with Fonepay as the partner network [[../countries/NP-nepal.md]], and India's report documents UPI as the country's dominant retail rail operated by NPCI [[../countries/IN-india.md]].

History

The corridor is the product of a partnership between NIPL (a wholly owned NPCI subsidiary) and Fonepay, Nepal's largest payment network [1][3]. Fonepay's CEO described it as the culmination of a roughly four-year effort to bring cross-border payments to Nepal [2]. UPI acceptance in Nepal went live in March 2024 [3]; Nepal's national report likewise dates the India-UPI corridor to March 2024 [[../countries/NP-nepal.md]]. A promotional event in Kathmandu on 2 May 2024, organised jointly by PhonePe and Fonepay, showcased the live service to Indian-app users [2]. By mid-2024 NIPL announced that cross-border P2M UPI transactions in Nepal had crossed the 100,000 milestone [3].

Technical specification

Linkage model. This is a one-directional merchant-acceptance linkage, not an account-to-account remittance corridor. An Indian traveller opens a UPI-enabled app and scans a Fonepay QR code shown at the Nepalese merchant's point of sale to complete payment [1][2].

Direction supported. As deployed, only Indian users can pay Nepalese merchants; the reciprocal capability (Nepalese citizens paying in India via UPI) was described as under development, potentially launching in 2025 subject to approvals from Nepal Rastra Bank and the Reserve Bank of India [1][3]. Coverage of related reciprocal access notes that Nepalese visitors to India can use the UPI One World app to scan Indian merchant QRs [3].

Transaction type. Strictly person-to-merchant (P2M) QR payments; the service explicitly does not apply to the personal bank QR of an individual [1].

Currency and FX. Payments are processed in Indian rupees (INR) and converted instantly into Nepalese rupees (NPR) for the merchant, removing the need for travellers to carry cash or use currency exchange [1].

Limits. Per-transaction caps were not stated in the fetched sources; Nepal's national report references daily volumes in the range of "Rs 6-8M daily" for the corridor [[../countries/NP-nepal.md]].

Use cases

• Tourist merchant payments. Indians are the largest visitor demographic to Nepal, and the corridor lets them pay at retail stores, hospitality, travel services, restaurants, tourist spots, and religious sites through Fonepay-affiliated merchants [1][2][3].
• Cashless travel. The instant INR-to-NPR conversion eliminates currency-exchange friction for short-stay travellers [1].

Implementations

The service works through standard Indian UPI apps including PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, and BHIM [1]. On the Nepalese side, acceptance rides on the Fonepay merchant network across hospitality, retail, travel, and restaurants [1]. PhonePe — which reports 520+ million registered users and a 38-million-merchant acceptance network — publicly promoted its support for the corridor at the May 2024 Kathmandu event [2]. NIPL separately worked with Nepal SBI Bank to operationalise RuPay cards in Nepal as a parallel initiative [3].

Comparison

Unlike the upi-paynow template — a true bidirectional account-to-account remittance linkage between two national instant-payment systems addressed by proxy identifiers — UPI-Nepal is a one-way merchant-acceptance model in which an Indian traveller scans a foreign merchant's QR [1][[../standards/upi-paynow.md]]. In that respect it resembles India's Sri Lanka and Cambodia merchant-acceptance corridors rather than the remittance corridor with Singapore. Against the multilateral nexus hub (which interconnects several ASEAN instant-payment systems plus India through a single switch), the Nepal corridor is a standalone bilateral QR-acceptance arrangement and does not pool settlement through a shared hub [[../countries/NP-nepal.md]]. Among the four India cross-border QR corridors documented here, Nepal is the most travel-driven and highest-volume given India's land border and the large flow of Indian visitors, but it remains unidirectional pending regulatory clearance, similar to France and Qatar and unlike Mauritius's bidirectional design.

Fun facts

• Fonepay framed the launch as the successful end of a roughly four-year journey to bring cross-border payments to Nepal [2].
• It was described as the first full-scale commercial deployment of UPI P2M QR acceptance outside India [1].

Status

Live since March 2024 [3][[../countries/NP-nepal.md]]. NIPL reported the corridor crossing 100,000 cross-border P2M transactions by mid-2024 [3]. Reciprocal (Nepal-to-India) UPI capability remained in development as of the latest sources, pending Nepal Rastra Bank and RBI approvals [1][3].

Sources

1 UPI in Nepal: Seamless Cross-Border Payments via Fonepay — Fonepay, 2025 2 PhonePe Showcases its Services Powered by UPI at a Special Event in Nepal — PhonePe, 2024 3 India's UPI surpasses 100,000 cross-border transactions in Nepal, expands to Maldives — CoinGeek, 2024

Deployments

No country reports mention this standard by name.

Regions / aggregations not mapped to a single country

• India–Nepal