Zimbabwe’s central bank is in talks with the International Payments arm of India’s NPCI, to build its digital payments infrastructure on UPI, Governor John Mushayavanhu confirmed to Bloomberg on Monday. The target is to wrap up negotiations before the end of this month.
The pitch from Harare is familiar — cut transaction costs, speed up settlements, reduce cash dependency. What makes Zimbabwe’s case specific is the remittance angle. Mushayavanhu said the country is interested in eventually using UPI for cross-border payments, which would directly address one of Zimbabwe’s more persistent economic pressure points: a large diaspora population sending money home through expensive, slow corridors.
NPCI International has been steadily signing these deals. Uzbekistan went live two weeks ago, becoming the first Central Asian country on UPI. Before that, deals were signed across the UAE, Singapore, France, Bahrain, and several Southeast Asian markets. The international arm was set up precisely for this — to export UPI as a ready-made payments backbone that countries can adopt without building their own infrastructure from scratch.
UPI’s numbers make the sales pitch easy. It now handles 49% of global real-time payment volumes, processes over 2,300 crore transactions monthly across more than 700 connected banks, and the IMF formally recognised it as the world’s largest retail fast-payment system in June 2025. For a regulator in Harare looking at Zimbabwe’s fragmented payment stack — US dollars, Zimbabwe Gold currency, mobile money, and legacy bank rails all running in parallel with minimal interoperability — a UPI-based layer is a credible solution to a real problem.
If talks conclude by October 31 as planned, Zimbabwe would be the first Sub-Saharan African country to formally adopt UPI infrastructure. A signed agreement and a live network are different things — previous NPCI International deals have taken months to over a year to go live after signing — but the deadline signals this is an active negotiation, not an exploratory one.