HARARE — Zimbabwe is negotiating with NPCI International Payments Ltd, the international arm of India’s National Payments Corporation of India, to develop a new real-time payments infrastructure as the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe seeks to make transactions faster, cheaper and more interoperable.
Reserve Bank Governor John Mushayavanhu said negotiations could be concluded by October 31, potentially paving the way for a payments system based on technology underpinning India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
The proposed infrastructure would connect commercial banks, mobile-money operators, fintech companies and other payment providers through a common platform, allowing transactions to be processed in real time.
Mushayavanhu said the system was expected to “reduce transaction costs and speed up payments”, while potentially giving banks a cheaper account-to-account alternative to cards for low-value domestic transactions.
The governor also said greater interoperability could allow banks and fintech companies to develop new financial products and provide merchants with lower-cost payment services.
Beyond another payments platform
The significance of the proposed arrangement lies less in introducing another digital-payment application than in creating common infrastructure underneath Zimbabwe’s fragmented payments ecosystem.
A shared national payments layer could allow different banks, mobile-money platforms and fintech companies to communicate through common technical standards rather than maintaining multiple bilateral connections.
That could lower barriers to competition and make it easier for customers to transfer money between institutions.
It could also strengthen the financial system’s ability to capture economic activity that currently takes place through fragmented or informal channels.
Mushayavanhu said the proposed system could improve the visibility of economic activity by small and medium-sized businesses, providing government with better data on their contribution to the economy.
For Zimbabwe, where formal banking, mobile money and multiple currencies coexist, interoperability is increasingly important. A more integrated digital payments architecture could help reduce friction between these parts of the financial system while supporting the broader formalisation of economic activity.
India’s UPI model expands into Africa
The proposed Zimbabwe arrangement follows NPCI International’s agreement with the Bank of Namibia in May 2024 to deploy technology based on India’s UPI for a domestic instant-payments system.
NPCI International said the Namibian project was intended to provide technological assistance for a real-time payments system and improve the country’s payment capabilities through shared infrastructure and interoperability.
Namibia’s model provides an important precedent for Zimbabwe because the objective is not simply to allow Indian consumers to use UPI while travelling abroad. Instead, the underlying technology can be adapted to help another country develop its own domestic payment infrastructure.
UPI has become one of the world’s largest instant-payment systems. More than 700 banks are connected to the network, while Indian government data cited in recent reporting puts its share of global real-time payment volumes at about 49% in 2025.
The harder part begins after the agreement
An agreement with NPCI would not, however, amount to the immediate launch of a national UPI-based payments system.
The technology would still have to be integrated with banks, mobile-money operators and fintech platforms, while regulators and market participants would need to agree on technical standards, pricing, security, settlement arrangements and participation rules.
That makes the October 31 target a negotiation milestone rather than a launch date.
The potential partnership nevertheless represents a significant shift in Zimbabwe’s approach to payments infrastructure. Rather than developing every component domestically, the country would be seeking to adapt a proven international payments architecture to its own financial system.
Mushayavanhu said Zimbabwe could eventually extend the infrastructure to cross-border payments and remittances, although those functions are not part of the immediate proposal.
For Zimbabwe, the strategic question will therefore be whether a more interoperable payments system can translate technological efficiency into lower transaction costs, greater formalisation and deeper financial intermediation.
For India, the negotiations would provide another opportunity to export the infrastructure and technical architecture behind UPI into an emerging market.
If an agreement is reached, the next test will not simply be whether Zimbabwe can deploy the technology, but whether banks, mobile-money operators, fintechs and consumers adopt a genuinely shared payments ecosystem.
