The ECB has priced TIPS cross-border instant payment links. Where do UPI and Pix stand?

What did the ECB decide?

The ECB’s TIPS cross-border page records that on 24 September 2026 the Governing Council decided the pricing framework for TIPS cross-border services. The framework comes into effect in mid-2027 with an update to the TARGET Guideline, the legal act that governs TARGET services. There is no dedicated monthly fee. The ECB has published the per-transaction fees, which are paid by the banks and payment providers that use TIPS, not set for end customers:

Source: ECB, TIPS cross-border payments, checked 30 October 2026. The ECB says the fees will be split equally between the TIPS participants involved, in line with TIPS pricing principles. For interlinking, a fee holiday will apply during the pilot phase of each corridor, for at most six months. These are prices between institutions. What a bank or remittance provider charges its customer is up to that provider.

Why does pricing matter?

Pricing is usually among the last things a payment infrastructure fixes before a service goes live. Banks and payment providers cannot build products, or work out what to charge customers, until they know their own costs. By setting the fees, and linking them to a TARGET Guideline update in mid-2027, the Eurosystem has put a rough date on when its cross-border services move from capability to commercial use. It has not set go-live dates for individual corridors.

The building blocks are already partly in place. The ECB says a baseline cross-currency capability, based on the European Payments Council’s One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) scheme, was implemented in TIPS in June 2025. A cross-currency settlement service built with Sveriges Riksbank and Danmarks Nationalbank has been available to all TIPS participants since October 2025. It lets Swedish and Danish consumers pay in their own currency to a payee anywhere in the euro area, who receives euro within seconds.

Where does the UPI–TIPS link stand?

Of the four links the Eurosystem is pursuing, the one with India’s UPI is furthest along. The RBI announced on 21 November 2025 that the RBI and NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) had agreed with the ECB to start the realisation phase of the UPI–TIPS link. The aim is cross-border remittances between India and the euro area. The RBI said work would cover technical integration, risk management and settlement arrangements.

The ECB describes the UPI corridor as “completing the legal arrangements and technical implementation”. Neither the ECB nor the RBI has published a launch date, so any date you see quoted is a guess. What the September decision adds is the price of the interlinking service and the fee holiday that will apply while each corridor is piloted.

What about Pix?

Brazil is the newest corridor on the ECB’s list. On 3 September 2026, Reuters reported, citing two people with direct knowledge, that the Banco Central do Brasil and the ECB were studying a link between their instant payment systems, and that a pilot could start in 2028 if the plan went ahead. The ECB told Reuters there was “an ongoing preliminary investigation exploring a potential interlinking”, and that it had named Pix in June as a currency corridor under exploration. The BCB declined to comment.

The Brazilian side had already signalled interest. In its Pix management report, published in August 2026, the BCB said it is assessing links between Pix and instant payment systems in other jurisdictions, through bilateral links and multilateral hubs, to make remittances and purchases faster and cheaper. Our Pix explainer covers the background, including US objections to Pix in a 2026 trade dispute.

How the pieces fit together

What does this mean for India?

A working UPI–TIPS link would let a payment start in a European bank account and land in an Indian one in seconds, using the two systems’ own rails rather than a chain of correspondent banks. The ECB’s decision does not change anything for users today, but it fixes what the TIPS side will cost the institutions taking part. That is a precondition for any bank or remittance firm planning a euro-to-rupee product on the link.

Two cautions. First, the link is designed for remittances. Whether and how it can carry business payments, such as an Indian exporter’s invoice, depends on the rules the RBI, NPCI and the ECB settle, which have not been published. Second, the published fees are only one part of the cost: currency conversion and the charges of the banks at each end will matter as much.