Pine Labs and WEBXPAY Launch India-to-Sri Lanka Cross-Border UPI Payments

Pine Labs and WEBXPAY have launched a cross-border payment partnership to enable Indian tourists in Sri Lanka to pay via UPI and domestic banking methods. For fintech professionals, this represents the first activation of the RBI’s Payment Aggregator-Cross Border (PA-CB) framework, creating a regulated template for exporting India’s digital payment stack to international merchant networks.

What was announced

The collaboration between Pine Labs and WEBXPAY establishes the first Payment Aggregator-to-Payment Aggregator (PA-on-PA) partnership in Sri Lanka. This arrangement operates under the Reserve Bank of India’s PA-CB framework, which permits licensed Indian payment aggregators to engage directly with international counterparts to facilitate regulated cross-border transactions.

Through this integration, WEBXPAY’s merchant network—which includes businesses in the hospitality, travel, retail, and online commerce sectors—can now accept a variety of Indian payment instruments. These include Unified Payments Interface (UPI), UPI AutoPay, Credit on UPI, and net banking services from more than 100 Indian banks. The system also supports EMI conversions and major Indian card issuers. For Sri Lankan merchants, the solution offers T+1 settlement and is designed to be embedded natively within their existing payment integrations, requiring no changes to their current infrastructure.

The partnership targets a high-growth corridor; in 2025, over 5.3 lakh Indian travellers visited Sri Lanka, making India the country’s largest source of tourism. Historically, these travellers faced friction at checkout due to the absence of familiar domestic payment methods. By bridging this gap, the companies aim to convert existing Indian demand into more consistent revenue for Sri Lankan businesses. The model is designed to be scalable, with the potential for replication in other international markets where Indian consumer spending is a significant factor.

"India’s payment stack is one of the most sophisticated in the world and Indian consumers carry that expectation with them when they travel. At Pine Labs, we believe the next frontier of cross-border commerce is making that experience portable. Sri Lanka is our first activation under the PA-CB framework, and we intend to replicate this model across Southeast Asia and every market where Indian travellers and consumers are a meaningful commercial force,"

Tanya Naik, Sr. EVP & Head of Online Business, Pine Labs

The companies involved

Pine Labs is a prominent merchant commerce platform that has significantly expanded its international footprint and product suite in recent years. The company provides a range of payment acceptance and merchant commerce solutions, including point-of-sale (PoS) terminals and online payment gateways. Its recent activities highlight a focus on both hardware and software innovation, ranging from the deployment of one million Soundboxes in India to the launch of AI-driven commerce tools. Pine Labs has established a presence in Singapore and maintains long-term technology partnerships in Australia with major retailers like the Woolworths Group.

WEBXPAY is a Sri Lankan fintech firm focused on enabling digital payments for merchants. By operating as a payment aggregator, it provides the necessary infrastructure for businesses in the hospitality, retail, and travel sectors to accept various digital payment methods. This partnership with Pine Labs marks a significant step for the company in bridging the gap between Sri Lankan merchants and the high-growth Indian consumer market, leveraging the regulatory framework provided by the Reserve Bank of India to facilitate seamless cross-border commerce.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed Pine Labs’ aggressive expansion and technological diversification. Recently, the company launched a unified payments and merchant engagement platform in Singapore, signaling its intent to capture the Southeast Asian market. In Australia, Pine Labs extended its strategic gift card tech partnership with Woolworths Group, demonstrating its capability to serve large-scale retail enterprises. Domestically, the firm has focused on scaling infrastructure and AI, deploying one million Soundboxes to accelerate digital payments and collaborating with Google Cloud to introduce agentic commerce for Indian small businesses.

What this means

This move signals a shift from bilateral diplomatic agreements for UPI acceptance toward a scalable, commercial "aggregator-to-aggregator" model. By utilizing the RBI’s PA-CB framework, Pine Labs is effectively commoditizing cross-border payment corridors that were previously the exclusive domain of global card schemes and high-fee currency exchange services. This puts immediate pressure on traditional payment providers in tourist-heavy corridors to lower costs and improve user experience. The success of this Sri Lankan activation will likely determine how quickly similar bridges are built across the ASEAN region, raising questions about whether local wallets in those markets can compete with the sheer scale and familiarity of the Indian payment stack.