How to Accept UPI Payments from India Without an Indian Entity

You can accept UPI payments from India without registering a company there.

A cross-border payment aggregator authorised by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) collects the rupees inside India on your behalf, converts them, and settles the money to your own account abroad.

We're Xflow, one such RBI-authorised aggregator, and this is exactly how we let foreign businesses collect UPI payments from India, under our own Payment Aggregator Cross Border (PA-CB) authorisation.

In practice, how to accept UPI payments from India comes down to four steps: pick an authorised provider, clear its one-time business check, add UPI to your checkout, and take settlement abroad.

The money ends up leaving India, so the RBI treats the whole chain as an outward cross-border payment - the licence and the paperwork sit with your provider, not with you.

• UPI AutoPay caps at ₹15,000 - a recurring mandate clears without extra authentication only up to that amount per charge.
• Four steps to live - choose a provider, pass its business verification, add UPI at checkout, receive settlement abroad.
• Settlement lands in your own currency - your provider converts the rupees and pays your existing overseas account, on a cycle it should state upfront.
• ₹25 lakh a transaction - the RBI caps a single cross-border aggregator collection at ₹25 lakh, inward and outward.
• GST stays with you - your provider moves the money, it does not take over your Indian tax position.

Four things happen between your customer's tap and the money landing in your account, and each one answers a different practical question:

• The customer pays in rupees - approved inside a UPI app they already use every week.
• Your provider collects in India - under its own PA-CB authorisation, never under yours.
• The rupees are converted - at the reference rate and the spread your contract sets.
• You are paid abroad - into your existing account, with a settlement reference attached.

Getting the direction right matters in your own books, because this is the mirror image of inward remittance, where an Indian business is paid by a client overseas. Both can happen inside one company, and the two are governed differently.

Three routes exist, and they split on one question that decides most of the rest: do you have to become an Indian company, and where does your money land?

The first keeps you foreign, the second makes you Indian, and the third bolts a single Indian payment method onto the card checkout you already run.

All three sit inside the RBI's rules for payment aggregators, the licensed middlemen allowed to collect money in India on somebody else's behalf. What differs is which of them needs you to become Indian first.

A cross-border payment aggregator with PA-CB authorisation

This route fits a company outside India that wants to be paid at home. A provider holding PA-CB authorisation may collect rupees inside India for you and settle them abroad, which is what lets you skip the Indian entity.

We hold that authorisation, and so do Razorpay, Cashfree and EximPe.

What separates providers inside the route is currency coverage, how much of the compliance they absorb, and which Indian payment methods they have live today.

Ask for that last one in writing, because a UPI-only rail and a fuller local set are often sold with the same words.

• A ₹25 lakh ceiling per transaction - every cross-border aggregator works under the same RBI cap, so one very large invoice needs a different arrangement.
• The spread, not the headline rate - conversion cost varies between providers, and the margin usually hides in the FX spread.
• GST stays with you - unless your provider is contractually the merchant of record, the Indian tax on the sale is still yours.

That last point is the distinction to get straight early. A payment provider collects for you while you stay the seller, so the Indian tax sits with you.

A merchant of record such as Paddle, Dodo Payments or Lemon Squeezy becomes the legal seller in India and takes the GST and the invoicing with it, usually for a higher fee.

Register an Indian entity and use a domestic gateway

You incorporate an Indian company or LLP, get a GSTIN and a current account, and plug into a domestic gateway such as Razorpay, Cashfree, PhonePe or Paytm.

Your Indian customers then pay you exactly as they pay any Indian merchant, and the rupees land in your Indian account, usually the next working day.

The genuine advantage here is processing cost.

Domestic UPI carries no merchant discount rate (MDR) for small merchants or for payments under ₹2,000, and from 15 October 2026 a new NPCI structure sets 0.4% on larger merchants above ₹2,000, capped at ₹300.

International card acceptance in India, by comparison, typically runs an all-in 3% to 4.5% once cross-border assessment fees and FX markup are counted.

That gap is the whole argument for the domestic route, and it only pays back at real Indian volume.

• Months, not days - an entity, a GSTIN and a current account take months, and usually a local director or agent.
• The money lands in India - getting it home is a second cross-border job, with its own conversion, fees and paperwork.

Switch UPI on inside a global card processor like Stripe

Some international card processors, Stripe the best known of them, let you switch UPI on as one more payment method with no Indian entity.

Your customer picks UPI, scans a code on desktop or is handed to their UPI app on mobile, and the processor settles into the account you already use.

Two caps decide whether it fits you. A Stripe UPI payment runs from ₹1 to ₹1,00,000, and a recurring mandate without step-up authentication stops at ₹15,000 a charge, which is an RBI limit and not a Stripe one.

On a UPI dispute the customer's bank decides the outcome, and the funds come straight out of your balance.

The honest trade-off is breadth. A card processor's UPI toggle gives you one Indian payment method, where a cross-border payment aggregator can offer several, so ask what else your buyers in India would reach at your checkout.

To you, UPI is one payment method. Indian buyers meet it in four different shapes, and the shape decides what your checkout has to build.

Three of them handle one-off payments, and the fourth, UPI AutoPay, is the only one that can carry a subscription on its own.

No card sits behind an AutoPay mandate, so nothing expires, gets reissued, or fails a foreign-card check. Most cross-border providers hand you Intent and QR from the start, since those two cover almost every online sale.

Ask about Collect if you invoice your Indian clients, and ask about AutoPay before you promise anyone a monthly plan.

Once the route is settled, the risk moves from strategy to the provider you sign with. Three checks catch most of it, and each is something you can ask for in writing before a contract is ever drafted.

• Is the authorisation final, or still in principle? A provider can be honest about holding an in-principle approval while sounding like it holds a final one, so ask which stage it has actually reached, in writing. You can also check the company name against the RBI's own published list of Certificates of Authorisation - our own entry there is dated 18 February 2026.
• What reference rate does the provider convert at? Cost comes in two parts: a collection fee you are quoted, and the FX spread when rupees turn into your currency - the spread is where the money usually goes, because it never shows up as a line item. A provider pricing on the live mid-market rate (MMR) has nowhere to put a second markup. Our own Import pricing is quoted against your expected volume, so ask us for a number you can compare.
• Who owes the GST on the sale, you or the provider? Selling a digital product or subscription to a consumer in India puts you under India's OIDAR rules, whatever your provider does with the money: registration on Form GST REG-10, no turnover threshold, 18% IGST, and a monthly GSTR-5A return. Selling to a GST-registered Indian business works differently, because reverse charge moves the obligation to your customer - and either way, that only shifts if your provider is contractually the merchant of record, so check the contract wording, not the marketing page. This is not tax advice, so confirm your own position with a chartered accountant.

The work between choosing a provider and taking your first rupee is short, and most of it is paperwork that somebody else chases.

Four steps cover it, and none of them needs an Indian company, an Indian bank account or an India payments hire.

How long it takes depends mostly on how fast your own team can produce incorporation documents, which is usually slower than the integration itself.

Engineering work is measured in days for a hosted checkout, and the compliance review runs alongside it rather than after it, so the two do not stack up end to end.

Step 1 - pick the provider and confirm it settles your currency

Safety is one question and fit is another. This step is about fit: whether a provider matches the business you actually run, in the currencies and methods you need. Check three things before the second call.

• Settlement currencies - USD, GBP, EUR, CAD and AUD are common, so name the ones you need up front.
• Methods live today - UPI, cards, netbanking and bank transfer are not all offered by every provider.
• Support model - a named contact beats a ticket queue on the morning a settlement is late.

Step 2 - pass the one-time KYB check on your business

Know Your Business (KYB) is the one-time verification every authorised provider has to run on you. You send incorporation documents, ownership and director details, and a plain description of what you sell and to whom. It all happens online.

Where it drags, it is almost always because a document is sitting with a director in another time zone, not because anyone is reviewing slowly. Expect days rather than weeks from a provider that has done this before.

Step 3 - add UPI to checkout with hosted, API or white-label

You have three integration shapes to choose between, and the right one depends on how much of the payment experience you want to own.

• Hosted checkout - the provider's page takes the payment and hands you back the result, which is the quickest to ship.
• API integration - your customer stays inside your own flow and your engineers control the Intent and QR handoffs.
• White-label checkout - your brand on the provider's infrastructure, sitting between the other two.

Our own Import product is sales-assisted, so we scope that choice with you instead of leaving you to switch it on from a dashboard.

Step 4 - collect in rupees and settle to your account abroad

Your customer pays in rupees and the balance reaches your overseas account in your own currency. Settlement cycles vary by provider, typically a handful of business days, so get the exact figure in writing before you sign.

Every payout carries a settlement reference, the cross-border equivalent of the UTR number on a domestic Indian transfer, alongside a reconciliation report your finance team can tie back to the orders behind it.

What this looks like end to end, worked through one sale

Picture a SaaS, edtech or marketplace business based in the US, UK or elsewhere abroad, watching Indian sign-ups climb and wanting renewals that do not depend on an overseas card charge.

They add UPI through an authorised cross-border provider, and nothing changes in their corporate structure.

An Indian customer approves a UPI AutoPay mandate once, at a monthly price well inside the ₹15,000 no-step-up limit, and the plan then bills on its own.

A couple of business days later, the converted balance lands in the company's own account, in its own currency.

That is the whole of what accepting UPI payments from India involves, whichever of these markets or verticals you're accepting it from.

Collected through an authorised provider, this is a licensed activity and not a grey area. It does come with numbers, and the numbers are the part almost nobody publishes.

Four limits and one legal exclusion decide whether your business fits, and each one traces to a named RBI direction or Act you can read yourself.

Two of them change what you can charge, so read them before your engineers scope anything.

The RBI rules behind these caps

The ₹25 lakh cap traces to the RBI (Regulation of Payment Aggregators) Directions, 2025 (RBI/DPSS/2025-26/141, Para 11(d), 15 September 2025), and applies inward and outward alike.

No provider can lift it, so split a larger invoice or move that customer to a bank-transfer arrangement instead.

The ₹15,000 AutoPay ceiling traces to the RBI's e-mandate framework (consolidated 21 April 2026): a recurring debit clears without extra authentication up to that amount, ₹1,00,000 applies only to insurance, mutual-fund and credit-card categories, and your customer's issuer must send a 24-hour pre-debit notice before every charge.

GST and OIDAR still sit with you, not the provider

Moving the money and owing the tax are two separate jobs, and your provider only does the first - the OIDAR registration and the 18% IGST liability, covered above, do not transfer just because a provider is handling the payment.

That only changes if your provider is contractually the merchant of record for the sale. Check the contract wording, not the marketing page, because this one is expensive to get wrong and the correction is retrospective.

UPI is not RuPay, and why that matters at checkout

Switching UPI on lets buyers pay from any UPI app, but RuPay, India's own card network, runs separately and does not come bundled with it.

If a slice of your Indian customers pays on that network, ask any provider directly whether it can take both.

Get that answer before your team builds anything, because it is awkward to retrofit a rail you assumed was included. Our own live rails today are UPI, cards on Visa and Mastercard, netbanking and bank transfer.

The one legal exclusion, and the sectors providers refuse

RBI does not publish one negative list naming every excluded category. Each payment aggregator sets its own board-approved onboarding policy instead, and a few categories are refused almost everywhere.

• Real-money gaming - the binding legal exclusion. Under Section 7 of the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, 2025, processing funds for an online money-gaming service is a criminal offence for the bank or facilitator doing it.
• Crypto, forex trading and gambling - refused as a matter of provider risk policy in most onboarding rules, not by one named RBI clause.
• Travel, online travel agents and non-wagering games - not excluded by that Act, and not barred by the RBI payment aggregator rules either.

We built our Import product for exactly this situation: a company outside India, with no entity there, that wants Indian customers to pay the way they already pay.

We hold final PA-CB authorisation from the RBI, as of February 2026, and final here means the fully approved stage, past in-principle.

We publish the full detail for companies that accept international payments from India, and here is the short version for a business based abroad.

• The Indian payment methods we have live - UPI, cards on Visa and Mastercard, netbanking and bank transfer.
• Settlement to your own account abroad - USD, GBP, EUR, CAD, AUD and more, paid through an AD-1 bank in 2 business days, with T+1 on request.
• The compliance carried for you - we and our AD-1 bank handle the FEMA requirements, the reconciliation and the Indian documentation, so you never open an entity just to sell.
• Security certifications - ISO 27001 and SOC 2.

Getting started runs through our team, not a self-serve signup. You tell us what you sell and where, we scope the checkout and the settlement currencies with you, you clear the KYB check once, and your Indian customers can pay.

Pricing is quoted against your expected volume, so get in touch for a number you can compare.

If India is a core market and you're ready to run an Indian company, the domestic route keeps processing cost down and pays for itself on volume.

If your Indian customers are still occasional, a card processor's UPI toggle can cover the basics, as long as the ₹1,00,000 and ₹15,000 caps don't cut across your pricing.

Most businesses selling to India from abroad sit between those two extremes, and for them a cross-border payment aggregator is the practical middle ground: the local payment methods your buyers expect, settlement in your own currency, and the Indian compliance carried by somebody who does it daily.

That is the route we built Xflow for.

Whichever one you choose, settle three questions before you sign anything, including with us. Is the provider's PA-CB authorisation final or still in principle? What reference rate does it convert at, and what sits on top of that rate?

And where does your GST liability land when the sale completes?