Deutsche Bank has optimised its connectivity with India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), using its latest direct payment rails which offer high transaction speed and a scalable platform.

The payment rails are designed to serve large merchants and Payment Service Providers (PSPs).

The bank can now offer these clients in India direct UPI collection services (enabling them to receive payments from customers), helping streamline payment acceptance, achieve higher collection efficiency, gain real-time visibility into transactions, and simplify reconciliation – while meeting local compliance requirements.

Developed by the National Payments Corporation of India, UPI is a real-time payment system that allows users to transfer money in real time between bank accounts using smartphone applications. UPI simplifies business to consumer, business to business and peer to peer payments in India.

UPI is currently recognised by seven other countries globally including Singapore, France and the United Arab Emirates, with several others expected to follow suit this year.

Through a single connection to Deutsche Bank’s Merchant Solutions platform, merchants gain access to UPI alongside Cards and other local payment methods.

The bank’s orchestration layer routes each transaction via curated PSPs, improving resilience and success rates while keeping Deutsche Bank as the counterparty of record.

Merchants can accept UPI through dynamic or static QR codes, collect requests and pay-by-link, with real-time status updates delivered to their systems or viewed in a self-service portal.

Consolidated settlement and normalised reports accelerate reconciliation, and the platform is engineered to support India’s data-localization and governance requirements.

This new capability delivers faster and more reliable payment processing to merchant solutions clients in India. With direct connectivity, Deutsche Bank is able to reduce the transaction hops (as compared to the PSP driven acceptance flow which is popular in the industry) resulting in significantly higher success rates. It also provides them with online access to real-time insights into collections, transaction statuses and customer behaviour.

Payment rails are underlying infrastructure and systems that facilitate the transfer of funds between parties, such as individuals, businesses and financial institutions.