Theme: Thursday

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | October 08, 2026 Beyond the tourist QR: four routes by which Indian finance crosses borders Coverage window: October 1–8, 2026. Last Thursday’s story was about cards and QR acceptance: Apple Pay entering India, UPI-enabled travel payments, and a RuPay-derived scheme gaining acceptance abroad. This week the movement is behind the checkout screen. Zimbabwe is discussing a UPI-based domestic payments system; a private fintech is pitching a cross-border financial platform; RBI’s unified trade-payment rules have taken effect; and India and the UK have restated a financial-integration agenda. These are not four versions of “UPI goes global.” They involve different technologies, legal authorities and stages of delivery. ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | October 01, 2026 The week the world’s wallets arrived — and India’s payment stack left home Cross-border fintech runs on two currents: money and infrastructure moving in, and Indian-built rails moving out. This week both flowed hard. Apple Pay went live in India after a decade of waiting, picking a bank partner and card networks but pointedly skipping UPI. The Reserve Bank’s cross-border card authentication deadline landed today, changing what happens when an Indian card is used on a foreign website. Trinidad and Tobago moved to become the first Caribbean nation to adopt UPI’s technology. In the Gulf, Checkout.com wired the UAE’s Jaywan scheme — built on India’s own RuPay stack — into global acquiring. And Bharti Airtel’s African money arm set course for a London listing at up to $9 billion. Five stories, one pattern: the borders in payments are being redrawn in both directions at once. ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | September 24, 2026 The week cross-border ambition met the licensing grind Global Fintech Fest’s applause has faded; what remains is paperwork — and this week the paperwork moved. PhonePe cleared the first regulatory gate for its first overseas market, India and Bhutan completed the neighbourhood’s first fully two-way UPI corridor, Kazakhstan emerged as the newest candidate for the UPI map even as the Alipay+ route stays frozen by geopolitics, a listed remittance company won perpetual forex licences to take cross-border payments to India’s small towns, and stablecoin infrastructure quietly raised institutional money to compete for the same corridors. Five stories that define the week. ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | September 17, 2026 The week global ambitions met settlement realities International and cross-border fintech owned the week. Global Fintech Fest 2026 (September 8–11, Mumbai) set the tone with the Prime Minister’s call to push UPI into more countries and cut remittance costs, and the BRICS New Delhi Summit (September 12–13) tested how much of that ambition survives contact with geopolitics. In between, the RBI handed out cross-border aggregator licences, a US payments bridge quietly took shape, and the gap between UPI’s 11-country map and its near-zero cross-border volume became impossible to ignore. Five stories that define the week. ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | September 03, 2026 UPI went diplomatic this week. A commercial agreement signed during a Prime Ministerial visit made Uzbekistan the eleventh country on UPI’s map, Canada put UPI on the agenda of its first-ever finance dialogue with India, and Nepal’s embassy was openly asking Indians to switch on “UPI International” to route flood donations through the rail. Behind the headlines sits the more interesting question for consumers: which of these corridors actually works when you land, which ones are press releases with regulatory approvals attached, and what it costs you either way. This week’s deep dive covers the full seven-day window of August 27 to September 3, 2026, across five stories: the Uzbekistan deal, the real state of UPI’s ten-market merchant map, the Canada dialogue, the Nepal disaster-relief rail, and Axis Bank’s new travel-safety toolkit. ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | August 28, 2026 This week’s International & Cross-Border theme lands at a fascinating inflection point. While UPI’s international ambitions continue to simmer — no new country linkage announcements this week — the global cross-border payments landscape is being reshaped by three powerful currents: India’s massive NRI dollar mobilisation, the QR code interoperability wars heating up across Asia, and the stablecoin settlement rails finally maturing from experiment to infrastructure. ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | August 27, 2026 This week’s deep dive examines the forces reshaping how money moves across India’s borders — from the RBI’s extraordinary NRI deposit scheme pulling in $73 billion, to the infrastructure plays positioning for the next wave of cross-border commerce. 1. India’s $73 Billion NRI Deposit Juggernaut — And What Happens When the Music Stops India has pulled in over $73 billion in foreign currency inflows in just 11 weeks, with nearly $65 billion coming from non-resident Indian (NRI) bank deposits alone, the finance ministry disclosed on August 25. The deposits could reach $80 billion before the incentive scheme expires on August 31, according to Nomura.1 ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | August 20, 2026 India’s cross-border payments infrastructure had a landmark week. Qatar Post launched UPI-backed remittances to India, the Maldives connected its instant payment system Favara to UPI, and the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Act, 2026 received Presidential assent — removing the statutory bar on UPI MDR just as the payments system goes global. Meanwhile, revised FEMA regulations are unlocking a new tier of cross-border players, and the gap between India’s ₹20,700 crore UPI ecosystem cost and its ₹2,000 crore government subsidy is forcing an honest conversation about who pays for global expansion. ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | August 06, 2026 This week’s theme: International & Cross-Border — tracking UPI’s global expansion, cross-border payment infrastructure, and the remittance corridors reshaping how money moves in and out of India. 1. Maldives Goes Live: Favara-UPI Cross-Border Corridor Opens for Real-Time Transfers The Maldives Monetary Authority (MMA) and NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL) announced the successful go-live of the Favara-UPI integration on 30 July 2026, marking the first cross-border payment corridor between the two nations. 1 ...

Fintech Deep Dive — Thursday | July 31, 2026 Theme: International & Cross-Border — Global Fintech, UPI Abroad 1. India Stack Goes Global: 24 Countries Sign DPI Partnerships, DigiLocker Deployments Begin in Kenya and Cuba India’s digital public infrastructure is no longer just a domestic story. The Ministry of Electronics and IT told the Lok Sabha on July 29 that India has signed cooperation agreements with 24 countries to export India Stack components — UPI, DigiLocker, e-Sanjeevani, and more — marking the most ambitious push yet to turn domestic DPI into a global export. 12 ...