Regional efforts to link domestic instant payment networks are accelerating, with projects like BIS’s Project Nexus and India’s UPI exploring broader international integration and access to global merchant networks.
Asia-Pacific’s instant payment networks are increasingly being designed for more than domestic use, as governments and central banks look for ways to extend fast, low-cost transfers across borders without rebuilding the payment rails from scratch.
According to the Bank for International Settlements, Project Nexus is intended to solve that problem by linking domestic instant payment systems through a common framework rather than a chain of one-to-one bilateral ties. The initiative brings together payment systems in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, with the aim of making cross-border transactions faster, cheaper and more transparent.
The BIS said the model differs from traditional correspondent banking because participants connect once and gain access to a wider network of markets. The central bank-backed project moved closer to live implementation after a prototype successfully linked test versions of payment systems in the Eurosystem, Malaysia and Singapore in 2023, before the scheme completed a blueprint in July 2024 and advanced towards an operational structure for live use.
India is exploring a separate path to international scale through its Unified Payments Interface, or UPI. The PYMNTS report says officials are discussing a possible link with Ant International’s Alipay+, which could allow Indian travellers to use UPI at overseas merchants already connected to Alipay+. Alipay+ says it spans more than 100 markets, about 1.8 billion user accounts and more than 150 million merchants, underscoring the potential reach of such an arrangement.
The two approaches highlight a broader shift in payments strategy across the region. One model seeks to make domestic systems interoperable through a shared multilateral framework; the other would plug a large national system into an established international merchant network. Either way, the underlying question is the same: whether instant payment systems built for home markets can achieve cross-border scale without a separate technical relationship at every border.
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