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Eiffel Tower tickets will now be available for purchase via Unified Payments Interface (UPI), making France the first European country to accept digital payments from India.
Indian tourists can go to the Eiffel Tower website and scan a QR code while making a payment from their UPI-enabled application.
NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) partnered with Lyra, a French leader in securing e-commerce and proximity payments, for the purpose. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Lyra was signed in 2022.
An official announcement was made at an event organised by the Indian Embassy in France to celebrate the Republic Day of India.
In February last year, India and Singapore launched the linkage between UPI and PayNow to facilitate instant and cost-effective cross-border payments between the two countries. Money can now be transferred from India to Singapore using mobile numbers and from Singapore to India using virtual payment addresses.
Over the past year India has pushed for cheaper ways to facilitate cross-border payments. In September 2023, Reserve Bank of India deputy governor T Rabi Sankar said that in the age of inexpensive data connectivity, it was “unconscionable” that average costs of cross-border transactions were at their prevailing elevated levels.
In October 2023 the NIPL signed an MoU with Al Etihad Payments of Abu Dhabi to facilitate cross-border transactions. The National Payments Corporation of India is in talks with the US, European countries and West Asian countries to extend UPI services.
