For a partnership that often gets less press than the EU-US Trade and Technology Council, the EU-India TTC is starting to deliver some of the most consequential digital infrastructure work in the democratic world. The pieces moving into place in early 2026 — NPCI International's deepening partnership with Worldline to bring UPI acceptance to European merchants, and ongoing technical conversations on whether India Stack components can interoperate with the EU's incoming European Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 — point to something larger than a payments deal. They suggest the contours of a transatlantic-and-eastward alternative to the closed, vertically integrated platforms that have dominated the last decade of digital commerce.
This is, on balance, very good news. And it deserves to be defended from the regulatory instincts that could smother it in the cradle.
What's actually happening
The EU-India TTC, formally launched in February 2023, has three working groups: strategic technologies and digital governance, green and clean energy tech, and trade and investment. Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) sits inside the first, and it has emerged as one of the council's most productive tracks. The European Commission has been explicit that interoperability with India's DPI stack is a strategic priority — not because Brussels wants to import Indian regulation, but because the alternative is conceding global digital plumbing to private incumbents or to Beijing.
On the payments side, NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) has signed a series of agreements over the last two years to bring UPI acceptance to European merchants, most prominently through partnerships with French payments processor Lyra and, more recently, the broader Worldline network. The practical effect: Indian travelers and the Indian diaspora in Europe can pay at participating merchants using their UPI app, and European merchants get access to one of the largest user bases of real-time digital payers in the world.
On the identity side, the eIDAS 2.0 regulation — adopted in 2024 and requiring member states to offer a European Digital Identity Wallet to all citizens — is the closest thing the EU has ever had to an Aadhaar-style identity layer, albeit with a very different architecture (decentralized, wallet-based, with selective disclosure built in). Technical conversations are exploring whether credentials issued under the EUDI Wallet could be recognized by Indian DPI components, and vice versa.
Why this matters
DPI is a deceptively simple idea: instead of letting a handful of private platforms own the rails for identity, payments, and data exchange, governments build minimalist, open, interoperable protocols and let the private sector compete on top of them. India's experience is the proof point. UPI processed an estimated 17+ billion transactions in a single month in 2025, the vast majority free at the point of use. Account opening, KYC, and credit underwriting that used to take weeks now take minutes.
That model is genuinely transformative for financial inclusion and for competition. It is also exportable in a way that proprietary stacks are not — which is precisely why Europe is paying attention.
The DPI bet is that the next decade of digital innovation comes from competition on top of open public rails, not from picking which closed platform to subsidize.
The proportionate-regulation angle
None of this means waving away legitimate concerns. The Indian DPI stack grew up in a regulatory environment with weaker data protection enforcement than the GDPR, and the original Aadhaar rollout had real civil liberties costs that the Supreme Court of India eventually had to constrain in its 2018 Puttaswamy judgment. Europe's Digital Identity Wallet, designed post-GDPR and post-Schrems II, has very different defaults — selective disclosure, unlinkability between use cases, no central transaction log.
The right policy posture is to push for genuine technical interoperability while preserving each side's privacy floor. That means:
- Cross-recognition of credentials and payment tokens, not bulk data sharing.
- Clear adequacy and onward-transfer rules that respect both the GDPR and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
- Open technical specifications published by both sides — UPI's API documentation is already public; the EUDI Wallet Architecture and Reference Framework is being iterated openly.
- Resistance to mandatory routing rules or local-champion carve-outs that would lock out private players and undermine the whole point of open rails.
The bigger picture
It is worth being honest about who loses if EU-India DPI cooperation succeeds. The card networks, the closed wallet platforms, and the identity-broker incumbents all face a serious competitive threat from interoperable public rails. Expect intense lobbying — some of it dressed up as security or sovereignty concerns — to slow this down.
European policymakers should resist that pressure. The continent has spent the last five years legislating against Big Tech concentration through the DMA and DSA. Building open, interoperable, internationally compatible digital infrastructure with India is the constructive twin of that agenda: not just breaking up closed systems, but creating viable open alternatives.
The TTC's DPI track is one of the few places in current EU digital policy where the answer to platform dominance is more innovation, not more rules. That instinct deserves more bandwidth, more funding, and more political cover — including from those of us who normally spend our time pushing back on regulatory overreach. When Brussels gets it right, it is worth saying so.