Best Ways to Accept Payments from Indian Customers

The best ways to accept payments from Indian customers are 1. UPI, 2. RuPay and other domestic cards, 3. netbanking, 4. digital wallets, and 5. recurring mandates like UPI AutoPay and e-NACH.

If your business is based outside India, you can take all five without registering an Indian company or opening an Indian bank account.

A licensed partner - a Payment Aggregator - Cross Border, or PA-CB - collects and settles the money on your behalf.

UPI, short for Unified Payments Interface, carries about 85% of India's digital payments in FY 2025-26, on the National Payments Corporation of India's ten-year figures. So it is the first method to get right.

If the money runs the other way, and you are an Indian business receiving payment from overseas clients, that is a different setup entirely.

The top payment methods in India come down to five: UPI, domestic cards including RuPay, netbanking, digital wallets and recurring mandates.

Each runs on its own set of Indian rails, so the methods your customers see at checkout depend on what your provider has integrated.

How UPI Payments Work for Your Checkout

• What it is - NPCI's real-time, bank-to-bank rail, approved from the customer's own banking app - Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm or CRED - instead of a hosted card form. The payment moves directly between bank accounts in seconds, with no card number or expiry date involved anywhere in the flow. It is the rail Indian customers reach for by default, ahead of cards or netbanking.
• Example - a customer renewing a monthly subscription taps to approve from their UPI app in seconds, with no card details entered.
• Watch for - one-time payments run between ₹1 and ₹1,00,000; anything at the very top of that band is worth a second look.

How RuPay and Domestic Cards Work at Checkout

• What it is - RuPay is NPCI's own domestic card network, alongside Visa and Mastercard cards issued by Indian banks; all three work the same way at your checkout. You need domestic card rails running alongside the international rails you already have, since a card issued by an Indian bank does not automatically route through your existing global processor.
• Example - a returning customer with a saved debit or credit card pays the same way they would on any other site, instead of switching to a banking app mid-purchase.
• Watch for - some providers have described cases where a RuPay debit card gets declined on a foreign checkout that only takes Visa and Mastercard, though no NPCI source confirms this either way - ask your own provider directly. Every Indian card also needs the RBI's extra authentication step from 1 April 2026.

How Netbanking Works for Bank-to-Bank Payments

• What it is - a transfer the customer approves inside their own bank's login, over NEFT (National Electronic Funds Transfer) or IMPS (Immediate Payment Service), instead of through a card or app. Your checkout needs a bank-by-bank integration, so the number of banks your provider has connected decides how many of your customers can actually pay this way.
• Example - a customer paying a larger one-off invoice logs into their bank directly and authorises the transfer, instead of trusting a card form with a big amount.
• Watch for - coverage depends entirely on how many banks your provider supports; a thin bank panel quietly turns this method off for part of your audience without ever saying so.

How Digital Wallets Work for Smaller Payments

• What it is - a prepaid balance the customer has already loaded inside an Indian wallet app. Each wallet is a separate integration, so supporting one does not mean you support them all, and the balance itself is the only thing the payment can draw on, with no linked bank account to fall back on if it runs short.
• Example - a mobile-first customer with a topped-up wallet balance pays for a small, frequent purchase in one tap, no bank login needed.
• Watch for - a wallet with an empty balance simply fails at checkout instead of prompting a top-up, so do not expect it to carry a high-ticket transaction.

Recurring Billing Through AutoPay, e-NACH and Card Mandates

If you bill monthly or annually, check the recurring cap before you compare headline fees. India has two mandate systems, and they cap at very different levels, so your plan price decides which one you need.

• UPI AutoPay - the real-time option, set up and revoked by your customer inside any UPI app. NPCI sets ₹15,000 per transaction as the limit for a mandate that debits without extra customer authentication, raised to ₹1,00,000 for specific use cases including insurance premiums, mutual-fund SIPs and credit-card bills.
• e-NACH - the older electronic mandate over bank rails, run through NPCI's National Automated Clearing House and authorised with netbanking, a debit card or Aadhaar. It settles in batches, usually within a working day, and carries no equivalent low-value threshold.

So a monthly subscription billed at a few thousand rupees sits comfortably inside UPI AutoPay's hands-off band.

Anything charged above ₹15,000 in a single hit, an annual plan most of all, loses that hands-off execution and needs the customer in the loop each time - e-NACH or a card mandate usually fits better instead.

The ₹15,000 recurring ceiling in Stripe's UPI documentation is this same NPCI cap showing through. Our Stripe review covers what else it does on the India leg.

Between your customer tapping pay and the money reaching your account, the useful thing to track is who is holding the money at each stage.

1. Checkout in rupees - your customer picks UPI, a card or netbanking on a checkout priced in INR, whatever currency you sell in.
2. Authorisation on Indian rails - a UPI PIN inside their app, or the OTP step for a card. The money leaves your customer's bank here.
3. Collection into a mandated account - the rupees land in the provider's Outward Collection Account, the INR escrow account the RBI mandates for proceeds owed to overseas sellers like you. Outward is from India's point of view, not yours. The Direction keeps those funds apart from inward ones, no co-mingling or netting off permitted under any circumstance, each account held with an AD Category-I bank.
4. Conversion and settlement - rupees convert and settle to your own account overseas, in USD, GBP, EUR, CAD, AUD or another major currency.
5. You never hold INR - no Indian bank account sits in the chain on your side, and no Indian entity holds the funds on your behalf.

Conversion and settlement timing is the step providers differ on most, and the documented cycles typically run from a couple of business days at one end to several weeks at the other.

Take the number from a provider's own terms rather than its marketing page.

Three setups cover almost everyone selling into India from outside it, and the one you are in changes your shortlist more than any single feature does.

Work out which fork you are on before you decide how to set this up.

• You sell into India from outside, with no Indian entity - the majority case, and the PA-CB route was built for it. A Payment Aggregator - Cross Border holds the Indian collection accounts on your behalf and settles the proceeds to your own account abroad, and the methods you can offer come down to what that provider has integrated. You keep your own pricing and your own currency throughout.
• You already have an Indian entity, or plan to register one - domestic acquiring opens up, and with it the wider set of international payment gateways that sell to resident businesses. Registering is a longer project carrying its own compliance load, so it earns its place when India is a market you are staffing and billing from.
• You would rather not be the seller of record at all - a merchant of record buys from you and resells to your customer, taking the tax and the customer relationship with it. You give up the direct relationship and some pricing control, and the compliance stops being yours.

The difference that matters between those last two is who the seller is.

A merchant of record becomes the seller to your customer and takes the tax with it, while a PA-CB provider only moves the money and leaves you as the seller throughout.

Our MoR vs PA-CB comparison goes through both sides properly.

Why Your Current Checkout Might Not Cover India Already

You are probably collecting something from India already, through a tool you use everywhere else. What it actually covers on the India leg depends on which of three categories it falls into.

Fees on the first two routes often stack in layers - a base commercial rate, a separate cross-border surcharge, and a currency-conversion markup - so add them up yourself rather than trusting a single headline number.

A newer aggregator's authorisation stage is worth checking at the point you actually integrate, since in-principle and final are not the same guarantee, and providers move between them during the year.

No. You do not need an Indian company, an Indian bank account or an Indian director to take money from Indian customers.

That is a common assumption for anyone used to setting up local entities in other markets, but India's rules do not require it here.

That is exactly the arrangement the PA-CB framework was built for - here is how the licence itself works, and where it stops short of your own GST and tax position.

How the PA-CB Licence Lets You Collect INR Without an Entity

The rule sits in the Reserve Bank of India (Regulation of Payment Aggregators) Directions, 2025, reference RBI/DPSS/2025-26/141, dated 15 September 2025, with the cross-border category in Chapter III. A licensed provider can collect from your Indian buyers into the accounts the RBI mandates, then settle the proceeds to you abroad.

You never touch an Indian bank account, because the provider's own collection accounts sit between you and your buyer.

And you can sell into India without a local business entity, invoicing in your own currency while your customer typically pays in rupees.

Final or in-principle

An authorisation is either in-principle or final, and final is the fully approved stage past in-principle. You can check any provider yourself on the RBI's list of authorised payment system operators.

We hold final PA-CB authorisation, as of February 2026, under Xflow Payments India Private Limited, and RBI's own list is where you can confirm it for yourself.

We are not a merchant of record, so you stay the seller to your customer throughout.

What Xflow Offers Under Its Own PA-CB Licence

Our own final PA-CB licence lets us offer you the following:

• Methods - UPI, cards, netbanking and bank transfer, under your own brand on the checkout
• Settlement - typically two business days to your own account abroad
• Onboarding - sales-assisted from day one, so you start with a conversation with our team, not just an API key, and get support built into your setup from the start

The RBI sets two limits that no provider can negotiate away for you, and either one can break an integration after it is built.

A ₹25 lakh ceiling applies to any single PA-CB transaction, in either direction, and a new cross-border card-authentication rule lands 1 October 2026.

Both come from regulation, not from any provider's price list, so the only real move is checking your own numbers against them before you commit to anything:

• Your largest single invoice from last year, converted to rupees - the ceiling applies per transaction, so the largest invoice is the one that decides whether it bites.
• The share of your India revenue that arrives on a card - the October rule touches cross-border card payments only, so a UPI-heavy business feels it far less.

What the ₹25 Lakh Per-Transaction Ceiling Means for Big Invoices

The ₹25 lakh ceiling is per transaction, not per month or per year, straight from the RBI's own Directions.

In practice this is a question for high-ticket sellers invoicing Indian clients rather than for subscription businesses, because an annual enterprise invoice can cross ₹25 lakh where a monthly seat-based one will not.

If one of yours does cross it, that payment cannot run through a PA-CB provider as a single transaction, so how you invoice becomes part of the setup conversation.

The October 2026 card rule

This is separate from the domestic authentication step above - your own INR collections still run on domestic rails and are unaffected.

What's new: by 1 October 2026, card issuers must be able to validate non-recurring cross-border card-not-present transactions when the overseas merchant or acquirer asks for it, risk-based with no single prescribed factor.

Ask your provider what they support by that date.

Your Own GST and OIDAR Position Is a Separate Question

The PA-CB licence answers how you collect the money.

It does not answer your own tax position - collecting money and owing tax are two separate questions, and India's GST rules for digital services sold from abroad, known as OIDAR, sit on your side of the line.

OIDAR, short for online information and database access or retrieval services, is the category most software and subscription sellers fall into.

• Selling to an unregistered Indian recipient - from 1 October 2023, the definition of a non-taxable online recipient covers any unregistered person in India receiving OIDAR services. Once your Indian buyers include unregistered recipients, registering for GST becomes your own obligation.
• Selling to a GST-registered Indian business - the buyer accounts for the tax under reverse charge and you do not register for that transaction. Notification No. 51/2023-Central Tax is the procedural companion, adding the reporting table those filings use.

You will see this written more simply elsewhere, as a flat "no GST needed". The distinction is real, and it is worth an hour with a cross-border tax adviser. We are a payments company, not your tax adviser.

If you are a business outside India selling to Indian customers with no local entity, here is what actually needs to be true before you go live, and where Xflow stands on each one:

• An RBI-authorised PA-CB provider - the licence is what lets you collect INR and settle abroad without an Indian company. We hold final PA-CB authorisation ourselves, not just in-principle, and you can confirm it on RBI's own list.
• UPI supported first, with cards and netbanking behind it - that ordering reflects how your Indian customers actually pay. We cover all three, plus bank transfer, under your own brand on the checkout.
• Your largest invoice under the ₹25 lakh per-transaction ceiling - a hard RBI limit no provider can move for you, us included, so check your own numbers regardless of who you choose.
• Your own GST and OIDAR position sorted separately from the payment licence - the two are not the same question, and it stays yours to work out with your own tax adviser whichever provider you pick.

Two of those four are exactly what we built Xflow around. The other two apply no matter who you choose, and our team can talk you through where you stand on all four.