Project Nexus: How UPI and Asia's Instant Payment Systems Will Connect

An engineer from Chennai working in Singapore can already pay a hawker stall with her phone in seconds, and her mother in Chennai can do the same at a vegetable market. But sending money between those two phones still means a money transfer app or a bank wire, with fees, an exchange rate markup and often a wait. Project Nexus is a bet that the fix is not another app. It is a connection between the national payment systems both women already use.

The problem Nexus solves

Many countries now have fast domestic payment systems: UPI in India, DuitNow in Malaysia, InstaPay in the Philippines, FAST and PayNow in Singapore, PromptPay in Thailand. Linking them one pair at a time is slow and expensive. Each link needs its own legal agreement, technical work and rules for currency conversion.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Five countries linking every pair need ten separate connections. Ten countries would need 45. With Nexus, each system connects once, to a shared hub, and can reach every other member through it. That is the whole idea.

How it got here

The BIS Innovation Hub started Nexus as an experiment in 2021. By 2024 it had a blueprint, and on 30 June 2024 central banks from India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand signed up in Basel to take it forward, The Asian Banker reported. The BIS said the first wave of countries covers a market of about 1.7 billion people.

In April 2025, those five central banks incorporated Nexus Global Payments in Singapore as a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, according to the Bank of Thailand. That moved Nexus from a BIS research project into a real organisation with its own staff and rulebook. Andrew McCormack, formerly founding head of the BIS Innovation Hub's Singapore centre and earlier responsible for Canada's real-time payments platform at Payments Canada, was named its first chief executive in August 2025.

Who builds it

In February 2026, Nexus Global Payments named a joint venture between Malaysia's PayNet and Singapore's NETS as its technical operator, with Amazon Web Services and Endava as technology partners, according to the announcement. Development was set to begin in early 2026, with go-live targeted for 2027 across the first group of countries. Both operators know cross-border links well: NETS was involved in the 2021 Singapore-Thailand account-to-account connection, and Malaysia's DuitNow already works with several neighbouring systems.

Membership is growing. Bank Indonesia became a full member on 2 February 2026, having been a special observer, and plans to connect its BI-FAST system. The European Central Bank has also been a special observer.

How a Nexus payment would work

1. The sender opens her usual banking or payment app and picks a recipient abroad, using a phone number or account alias where supported.
2. Her domestic system passes the payment to Nexus using standard ISO 20022 messages.
3. An FX provider on the network offers a rate, shown to the sender before she confirms.
4. The payment is passed to the recipient's domestic system and credited, with the target of finishing within 60 seconds.

The recipient does not need to know anything about Nexus. To her it is just money arriving in her normal account.

Nexus does not ask anyone to adopt a new currency or a new app. It asks the plumbing to talk to itself.

Why India's participation matters

UPI is the heavyweight. It averaged about 802 million transactions a day in September 2026, and India receives more remittances than any other country. A UPI connection to Southeast Asia through a single hub would cover corridors used by huge numbers of migrant workers, students and small exporters. India already has bilateral links, such as UPI-PayNow with Singapore, but Nexus would replace a patchwork with one standard connection. We cover UPI's international push in UPI's global expansion.

Cost is the prize. The World Bank's estimate, cited at the 2024 signing, put the average cost of sending $200 across borders at around 6.2%. The World Bank's latest figure, for the third quarter of 2025, is 6.36%. Instant links between domestic systems can strip out several layers of that, though FX spreads and provider fees will still apply. For more on where those costs come from, see the cost of sending money home.

Why not just more bilateral links?

Bilateral links do work, and Asia has built several. Singapore and Thailand connected PayNow and PromptPay in 2021. India linked UPI with Singapore's PayNow. Malaysia's DuitNow is connected with schemes in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia. Each was a real achievement.

The trouble is what happens as the network grows. Every new pair needs fresh negotiations on rules, liability, fraud handling, messaging formats and currency conversion. Each link is a little different, so banks and apps have to build to several specifications. A Filipino nurse in Singapore and a Thai student in Kuala Lumpur end up with different experiences, limits and prices depending on which link they use.

Nexus standardises all of that. One rulebook, one technical specification, one governance body owned by the members. A new country does the work once and reaches everyone already connected. That is the same logic that made card networks and SWIFT valuable decades ago, applied to instant account-to-account payments.

What could slow it down

• Compliance. Every payment must clear sanctions and anti-money-laundering checks in both countries, in seconds.
• Capital controls. Some members restrict how much currency can flow out, and those limits apply to Nexus too.
• FX liquidity. Someone has to hold the currencies and quote good rates for smaller pairs, such as pesos to baht.
• Domestic readiness. Each system must upgrade to plug in, and timelines can slip.

How it fits the bigger picture

Nexus is the retail, account-to-account answer to cross-border payments. It sits alongside the wholesale experiments using central bank tokens, such as mBridge and Agorá, and private alternatives such as stablecoins. We think the instant-payment route has one big advantage: people already trust and use the systems at each end. If Nexus delivers in 2027, a transfer from Singapore to Chennai could start to feel like a domestic payment.

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