Global Payments

A real-time payment rail moves money between accounts quickly, often around the clock — examples include UPI, Pix, PayNow and Faster Payments. It differs from a card network in initiation, access and dispute processes. Merchant prices are not uniformly zero: Pix merchant acceptance is market-priced, and India's selected UPI P2M payments above ₹2,000 gain a 0.4% fee from a post-Diwali date still to be notified with caps and exemptions. Operators need each rail's current fee and refund rules.

Regulation, consumer adoption and distribution all shape which payment method dominates. India's 2020 UPI zero-MDR rule helped merchant adoption, but selected merchant payments gain a fee from a post-Diwali date still to be notified. Brazil's Pix has a different model: P2P is free while merchant pricing is market-based. Operators entering a market should identify the dominant rail and verify the current commercial and regulatory terms for their own use case.

Start with the payment methods relevant to your target customer segment and transaction type. Check acceptance, provider access, pricing, refunds and reconciliation for that use case. Use the market guide to plan coverage rather than assuming national adoption establishes the right mix for every merchant.

A merchant accepting international card payments is primarily using Visa or Mastercard's cross-border acquiring rules — the card scheme routes the transaction globally, the merchant's acquirer converts currency, and the issuer pays in the cardholder's home currency. For bank transfer payments (SWIFT), the payment travels through correspondent bank chains that add cost and delay. For digital wallets (Alipay, WeChat Pay), the operator typically needs a local aggregator licensed to settle cross-border wallet transactions. Distinguish bilateral real-time rail linkages such as UPI-PayNow from the multilateral Nexus framework. Verify the participants, provider, product and availability of any proposed corridor before relying on it as an alternative route.

Project Nexus is a BIS Innovation Hub initiative designed to interconnect domestic instant payment systems through a multilateral framework, rather than a separate bilateral connection for every pair of systems. The bilateral UPI-PayNow connection and Nexus are distinct: an existing bilateral linkage does not establish that Nexus is operational on that corridor. Assess the available provider, participants and payment product for your intended route. For operators, Nexus matters because it is the emerging architecture for low-cost, real-time cross-border settlement — and it may eventually make SWIFT correspondent banking optional for retail payment corridors where Nexus has coverage.