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Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the United Arab Emirates and Singapore have both expressed interest in adopting homegrown card payment network solution RuPay.

Speaking to scholars of The Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington, Sitharaman said India is consulting with several other countries too to look into making RuPay acceptable.

“Not just that, the UPI, the BHIM app, and NPCI are all now being worked in such a way that their systems in their respective country, however robust or otherwise, can talk to our system and the inter-operability itself will give strength for Indians’ expertise in those countries,” she said.

The remarks Sitharaman made in the US, where she’s on an official week-long visit to attend annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, came just when Europe rolled out UPI services, via a deal with Worldline.

NPCI’s international arm announced the deal with Worldline this week, saying the latter will allow merchants’ point-of-sale (PoS) systems to accept UPI payments, as well as RuPay across Europe.

Nepal, Singapore, France, Malaysia, Bhutan, and the United Kingdom are some other countries that have adopted the National Payments Corporation of India-backed UPI.

Singapore-based Liquid Group recently inked a deal with NIPL (NPCI’s international arm) to enable QR-based payments in 10 countries including Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, among others.