Five Southeast Asian nations, including Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, are developing a shared framework to link their domestic real-time payment systems. This initiative, known as Project Nexus and supported by the Bank for International Settlements, aims to replace individual bilateral connections with a single access point to a broader network.
The project intends to reduce costs and delays typically associated with routing cross-border payments through correspondent banks. By utilizing a common framework, participants gain network access through one connection, which simplifies geographic expansion for financial institutions and payment providers compared to maintaining multiple separate technical relationships.
Separately, government and central bank officials are exploring a connection between India’s Unified Payments Interface and Ant International’s Alipay+. This integration could enable Indian users to utilize UPI at merchants within the Alipay+ network, which currently spans over 100 markets, 1.8 billion user accounts, and more than 150 million merchants.
While Project Nexus focuses on interconnecting national instant payment infrastructures, the UPI-Alipay+ proposal seeks to link a domestic system with an established international merchant platform. Both approaches represent distinct strategies for expanding the reach of real-time payment systems beyond domestic borders without building unique links for every corridor.
