Indian travellers in Sri Lanka will soon be able to pay the way they do at home. Mumbai-headquartered payments and commerce platform Pine Labs has partnered with Sri Lankan digital payments company WEBXPAY to let merchants on the island accept UPI and a wide set of Indian payment options, in what the two companies describe as the first Payment Aggregator-to-Payment Aggregator (PA-on-PA) arrangement of its kind in Sri Lanka under the Reserve Bank of India’s Payment Aggregator–Cross Border (PA-CB) framework.
What merchants can now accept
Through the tie-up, WEBXPAY’s merchant network across hospitality, travel, retail and online commerce can accept:
- UPI and UPI AutoPay
- Cards issued by major Indian banks
- Net banking across more than 100 Indian banks
- EMI conversions and Credit on UPI
Settlement happens on a T+1 basis, and the capability is embedded into WEBXPAY’s existing merchant integrations, so businesses do not need to change their payment infrastructure to start accepting Indian payment methods.
Why Sri Lanka, and why now
India is Sri Lanka’s largest source market for tourism, with more than 5.3 lakh Indian visitors in 2025 and momentum continuing into 2026. Yet many of these travellers have struggled at checkout when familiar options such as UPI and Indian net banking were unavailable, leading to failed or abandoned payments and lost revenue for merchants.
The PA-CB framework addresses this by allowing RBI-authorised Indian payment aggregators to partner directly with overseas aggregators, so Indian payment methods can be accepted abroad within a regulated, compliant structure.
What the leaders said
Tanya Naik, Senior EVP and Head of Online Business at Pine Labs, said Indian consumers carry the expectations set by India’s payment stack with them when they travel, and that making that experience portable is the next frontier of cross-border commerce. She added that Sri Lanka is the company’s first activation under the PA-CB framework, and that Pine Labs intends to replicate the model across Southeast Asia and other markets where Indian consumers are a significant commercial force.
WEBXPAY Executive Chairman Thilak Piyadigama said Indian customers already know and trust methods such as UPI, cards and net banking, and that bringing that familiarity to the online checkouts of Sri Lankan merchants can remove a major point of friction and help them convert more Indian demand into revenue.
The bigger picture
The partnership is another step in the steady internationalisation of Indian payment rails. While NPCI International has been building UPI linkages with other countries at the network level, the Pine Labs–WEBXPAY model shows how licensed private payment aggregators can extend Indian payment methods abroad through commercial partnerships. If the model scales across Southeast Asia as planned, it could make Indian checkout experiences increasingly available wherever Indian travellers and shoppers go.
Travellers should, however, check which payment methods a merchant supports and review any bank charges, foreign-exchange mark-ups and conversion terms that may apply.
