U.S. Treasury official Jay Shambaugh lauded India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for its excellent work in fostering bilateral ties with other countries like Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. Speaking at Harvard Law School, Shambaugh, who holds the position of Under Secretary of the US Treasury for International Affairs, discussed the significance that emerging technologies play in cross-border credit transactions.
“India stands out as a jurisdiction advancing bilateral links between its Unified Payments Interface system (UPI) and those of other countries, including Singapore and the United Arab Emirates,” he remarked.
His speech focused on the shared ambition of several ASEAN countries to establish interoperable, high-speed monetary transactions. Significant investments are being made by banks, payment service providers, system operators, and financial market infrastructures (FMIs) to improve the speed, cost, accessibility, transparency, and efficiency of their systems for individual customers as well as the financial industry.
He also talked about how the "G20 Payments Roadmap" has been essential in guiding efforts toward achieving "Payment system interoperability and extension," which seeks to improve payment system connection and operational alignment along critical corridors, and is one of the main emphasis areas of the G20 strategy.
Shambaugh talked about current investigations on the future of money and payments taking place in several jurisdictions. This includes testing out distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based payments and cross-border Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Although he acknowledged that these technologies had the potential to completely transform payment systems, he also issued a warning that the actual implementation might be more difficult.
“In theory, new technologies in this space present the opportunity of a fresh start for payment systems, although the reality may be more complex. In an idealised vision, we could use these technologies to design cross-border payment systems with all of the beneficial features of legacy systems, plus some additional features that legacy systems do not provide,” he maintained.
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