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India Unwraps UPI and Aadhaar Service APIs to Foreign Nations

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India is making a host of its e-governance tools – including the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Aadhaar identity service – available to other countries via open APIs.

Available via the India Stack website, the project is “a set of open APIs and digital public goods that aim to unlock the economic primitives of identity, data, and payments at population scale”.

Says the site: “The principles, technologies, and functionality of India Stack can be applied in any country. None of the systems which comprise India Stack require any proprietary technology or intellectual property which would preclude their implementation in any other country.”

In a speech during Digital India Week, prime minister Narendra Modi boasted about the success of the instant payments network, UPI, claiming: “Everyone, including the World Bank, has appreciated it as the best platform.”

Launched in 2016, the UPI has now handled 99 billion transactions, recording 2200 every second in May.

Along with the RuPay card network, UPI has been central to India’s efforts to use digital payments to boost financial inclusion. Modi says this has proved a huge success, noting: “Once, I found that a beggar in Bihar was begging on a platform and he was taking money digitally.”

Says Modi: “Therefore, today digital products like UPI are the centre of attraction for developed countries of the world, or those countries which cannot invest in this type of technology. Our digital solutions have the reach, are secure and have democratic values.”

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Financial

Adopting AI Responsibly in Public Finance

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving from automating routine tasks to becoming a predictive—and even prescriptive—tool in public finance. At Thursday’s New Economy Forum Workshop, two panels explored how AI and GovTech are being used across governments, and how to scale responsibly while pushing innovation forward.  

“It’s not about getting one big thing right… [it’s about] getting 32 million things right,” said Edward Kieswetter, Commissioner of the South African Revenue Service. Since introducing AI tools like chatbots, biometric facial recognition for e-filing registration, and web-based assistance, South Africa has added $18 billion to its fiscal year revenue. Kieswetter pointed to three key gains: streamlining services for taxpayers, stronger compliance and fraud prevention, and most notably, increased public trust. 

Across OECD countries, “there is no single or even preferred model [of adoption]”, said Delphine Moretti, Working Party Lead on Public Financial Management and Reporting for the OECD. Governments are using AI to forecast economic trends and help inform spending decisions. France and Indonesia, for instance, use AI to monitor fiscal risk at the subnational level through accounting data. Still, oversight bodies, public financial management frameworks, and communities of practice are critical to help manage risk and ensure that innovation leads to real gains. 

In Brazil, AI is also being leveraged for fiscal education. Tania Gomes, Coordinator for Data, Products and Digital Transformation, Treasury of Brazil, showcased “Talk to SICONFI”, a generative AI agent that answers queries on public fiscal data across federal, state, and local levels. Promoting training and digital literacy for AI is just as essential, she added. 

AI tools can be scaled broadly at extremely low costs, but doing so requires strong risk management frameworks and agile governance, says David Hadwick, a researcher at the Centre of Excellence ‘Digitax’. Spanish Tax Agency’s Chief Information Officer, José Borja Tomé, illustrated this with the agency’s “test-and-pause” approach, underscoring that “assigning responsibility is key”. 

Panelists agreed that policies guiding AI use in public finance should prioritize transparency, fairness, efficiency, and use trusted, high-quality data. Increasingly so, “the metrics of AI ethics correspond to the metrics of performance for these administrations,” Hadwick added.

Culled from IMF.org

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Standard Chartered Joins Temenos Partner Programme

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Through the integration, financial institutions (FIs) on the Temenos platform will benefit from a faster go-to-market in accessing the Standard Chartered’s extensive currencies offering, allowing them to price services across more than 130 currencies and 5,000 currency pairs while managing exposure risks to FX market volatility.

The integration releases the strain on inhouse technology resources, which is considered beneficial for retail banks, wealth managers and payment providers handling low-value or high-volume transactions that sit outside their treasury function.

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Financial

Global Payments to Acquire Worldpay for $22.7bn

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  • The payments sector is getting a major shakeup, with Global Payments agreeing a $22.7 billion deal to acquire Worldpay from GTRC and FIS while offloading its Issuer Solutions business to FIS for $13.5 billion.

Global Payments says Worldpay provides highly complementary payments, software and commerce enablement technology to merchants and partners worldwide. On a combined basis, the company will serve more than six million customers and enable approximately 94 billion transactions and $3.7 trillion in volume across more than 175 countries.

Cameron Bready, CEO, Global Payments, says: “The acquisition of Worldpay and divestiture of Issuer Solutions further sharpen our strategic focus and simplify Global Payments as a pure play merchant solutions business with significantly expanded capabilities, extensive scale, greater market access and an enhanced financial profile.”

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