Indonesia Targets a QRIS-UPI Link With India by End of 2026

Indonesia wants its QR payment code to work in India by the end of 2026, the second such link in four months after April’s tie-up with China. Bank Indonesia and Indian officials describe the technical work connecting the Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS), Indonesia’s national QR payment standard, with India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the country’s real-time bank payment network, as already at an advanced stage.

But Bank Indonesia’s own transaction numbers tell a different story about where the current cross-border boom is actually coming from. Malaysia, not China, is driving most of today’s activity, and the central bank’s newest corridor is still missing entire payment apps three months after launch.

A Rupiah-Rupee Bridge Takes Shape

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised the plan during Modi’s state visit to Jakarta on July 7, his first trip to the Indonesian capital since 2023. A joint statement from the two governments said the linkage, agreed between the Reserve Bank of India and Bank Indonesia, “marks an important milestone in strengthening bilateral payment connectivity between Indonesia and India.”

“One of the greatest strengths of our relationship is people-to-people ties,” Modi said at a joint press conference at the Merdeka Palace. Prabowo, for his part, said the tie-up “is expected to boost transaction efficiency, while making our financial sector more resilient.”

Once live, Indonesian shoppers would pay Indian merchants in rupiah while Indian travelers pay Indonesian merchants in rupees, with each country’s home payment system handling the mechanics on its own rails. Indian Ambassador to Indonesia Sandeep Chakravorty told reporters on July 7 that “the process is still ongoing, but it is already at a very advanced stage.”

The joint statement said the linkage would particularly benefit micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), the tourism sector and students. Indian nationals were already the third largest source of foreign tourist arrivals to Indonesia between January and May 2026, with 222,470 visitors behind only Australia and China.

Malaysia Leads the Cross-Border QRIS Boom

Cross-border QRIS transactions jumped 380 per cent year on year to 2.71 trillion rupiah (about US$151 million) in the first five months of 2026, Bank Indonesia data show. Transaction volume rose 339 per cent to 2.06 million over the same period.

Foreign visitors accounted for 83 per cent of that total, worth 2.25 trillion rupiah in inbound spending. The single biggest contributor wasn’t China.

Bank Indonesia deputy governor Filianingsih Hendarta attributed the surge to stronger cross-border mobility, a continued recovery in tourism and the expansion of payment connectivity partnerships with overseas counterparts.

Scale still separates the three markets by a wide margin. Indonesia’s QRIS processes about 170 million transactions a day, next to more than 400 million daily UPI transactions in India and over 1.2 billion mobile and QR transactions China handles daily.

“Indonesia stands out for the pace of QRIS expansion,” said Roshan Raj Behera, a partner at Redseer Strategy Consultants. “China will remain ahead on domestic scale and trade-linked payment volumes. Indonesia’s stronger opportunity is interoperability,” he said.

Seven Years, Eight Countries

QRIS launched domestically in August 2019, timed to Indonesia’s Independence Day. Seven years on, it has more than 62 million users, and Bank Indonesia wants cross-border reach in eight countries by the end of 2026.

“In 2026, we will continue to drive the expansion of QRIS by embracing the theme of independence, represented by 17, 8, and 45,” Filianingsih said, referring to a 2026 target of 17 billion transactions, cross-border usage across eight countries and a merchant network of 45 million.

1. August 2022: Thailand becomes the first cross-border QRIS partner, letting Indonesian travelers pay without converting rupiah to baht.
2. May 2023: Malaysia connects through DuitNow QR.
3. November 2023: Singapore joins, adding acceptance at NETS, SGQR and SFQR+ terminals.
4. August 2025: Japan becomes the first non-Asean country on the network.
5. April 2026: South Korea connects, then China goes live on April 30 through Alipay and UnionPay.
6. End of 2026 (targeted): India and Saudi Arabia are next in line as Bank Indonesia pushes toward eight connected countries.

Each entry on that list required its own separate negotiation. That approach is starting to show its limits.

Even the Newest Link Has Gaps

The China corridor Indonesia is using as its template isn’t fully built either. Alipay and UnionPay went live when the link switched on April 30, but WeChat Pay and China’s MPC network remain stuck in technical review, said Santoso Liem, chairman of the Indonesian Payment System Association. Chinese providers are still consolidating their own internal QR standards before the link can widen, Santoso said.

“The market in these two countries is very big,” he said of the opportunity once it does.

A sandbox trial that ran from August 2025 to the April launch showed how lopsided early usage can be. Chinese visitors in Indonesia generated 1.64 million inbound transactions worth 556 billion rupiah during the trial, according to Fintech News Indonesia. Indonesians using QRIS in China managed just 8,000 transactions worth 6.4 billion rupiah over the same period.

The integration now involves 16 banks and eight non-bank institutions on the Indonesian side, plus 19 institutions in China. Bank Indonesia Governor Perry Warjiyo called the corridor proof of concept at its Jakarta launch. “Whether Indonesians go to China or Chinese visitors come to Indonesia, they can use QRIS,” he said, adding that all it takes is a mobile phone.

For Beijing, the motivation runs deeper than convenience. Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific region at French investment bank Natixis, said the move reflected Beijing’s push toward “advancing dedollarisation efforts and the international use of the yuan.”

Indonesia’s own payment sovereignty push has drawn friction too. Washington has separately flagged Indonesia’s QR rules as a trade barrier, a reminder that the same domestic-routing rules that support local currency settlement abroad have made trade officials elsewhere uneasy.

The Small Merchants Waiting on the Other End

For millions of Indonesian shopkeepers, the appeal is arithmetic. Most QRIS transactions carry a merchant discount rate of just 0.7 per cent, well below what international card networks typically charge, and a merchant who already displays a QRIS code needs no new hardware to accept a foreign scan.

• Small merchants – more than 40 million QRIS merchants, most of them MSMEs that make up over 99 per cent of Indonesian businesses, can accept a foreign scan without new terminals or fees beyond the standard 0.7 per cent rate.
• Tourists and travelers – Indian arrivals to Indonesia reached 222,470 between January and May 2026, giving merchants a fresh customer base that no longer needs cash or a foreign card.
• Remittance senders and students – the joint Indonesia-India statement singled out students as a beneficiary group, and industry executives say cheaper transfers could follow for a corridor already carrying heavy remittance traffic.

Vince Iswara, chief executive of Indonesian e-wallet Dana, said the China corridor already shows the pattern the India link is likely to follow. “We see this as an opportunity for Indonesia to go abroad,” Iswara said.

“China is currently the largest destination for outbound remittances from Indonesia,” he said. “With this connectivity, transactions become more affordable while also helping us increase inbound spending from China.”

Dana, which serves more than 200 million registered users and processes around 70 million domestic transactions a day, expects the China corridor to drive triple-digit growth in cross-border transactions. “The growth rate will be far higher than 100 per cent,” Iswara said, though the company declined to give a specific forecast.

Can Bilateral Deals Like This Scale?

Not indefinitely, analysts say. Each new QRIS corridor needs its own technical integration, legal agreement, compliance regime and foreign exchange settlement arrangement, and Redseer’s Roshan Raj Behera argues that model hits a ceiling as more countries join unless Indonesia and its partners shift toward shared infrastructure instead.

Behera pointed to the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Nexus, a platform designed to let countries settle cross-border payments in under 60 seconds by connecting once rather than negotiating bilateral links one at a time. “The long-term solution is a multilateral network,” he said.

India is already a founding participant in that multilateral project. Bank Indonesia, by contrast, holds only special observer status, even as it signs bilateral QR deals with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China and now India.

UPI’s own record abroad suggests bilateral links don’t always deliver evenly once signed. Indian travelers can already use UPI in Nepal through the Fonepay network, but Nepali citizens still can’t fully use UPI for purchases in India, a gap tied to unresolved commission disputes, Forbes contributor Zennon Kapron reported.

If the region is still relying mainly on country-by-country bilateral links by 2031, it would mean the payment infrastructure has not kept pace with the opportunity.

Behera said, arguing that the pace of bilateral deal-making needs to give way to shared infrastructure before the corridor count keeps growing.

Two Dates Now on the Calendar

Bank Indonesia isn’t waiting to find out. The QRIS-UPI corridor remains targeted for completion by the end of 2026, the same year the central bank wants QRIS live across eight countries total.

“We expect to see the first live cross-border transaction on Nexus around 2027,” said Benjamin Lee, interim director of Nexus Global Payments, a nonprofit incorporated in April 2025 to run the network.

Indonesia’s own target is closer: rupiah and rupees, scanning the same code, by the end of 2026.