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EximPe vs Stripe
Stripe for India: What Works, What Doesn't, and Where Foreign Merchants Lose Indian Customers
Stripe technically supports cards from Indian customers via Stripe accounts in non-India countries, but cannot collect via UPI, NetBanking, or Indian wallets — together the dominant share of Indian digital payments. India has roughly 95M credit cards versus 500M+ active UPI users, and foreign merchants using Stripe see significant Indian-card decline rates due to RBI 2-factor authentication and tokenization rules. EximPe is an RBI PA-CB licensee that complements Stripe by adding India-domestic methods with non-INR settlement to overseas accounts in 30+ currencies, no Indian entity required.
What Stripe currently supports for India
- · Stripe Atlas accounts and Indian customers (cards only)
- · Stripe Connect for India — limited; requires Stripe India partnership
- · Not supported: UPI, NetBanking, Wallets, EMI, COD, UPI AutoPay
Stripe Atlas lets foreign merchants accept payments from Indian customers using the same Stripe primitives — Checkout, Elements, Connect — that work in every other market. The integration model does not change. A US-incorporated SaaS company can take a card payment from a buyer in Bangalore today, settle the funds to a Stripe Balance in USD or another supported currency, and run the same fraud rules and reporting flow it uses for buyers in Berlin or Buenos Aires.
The card path is the only path. Stripe Connect supports Indian sellers in a limited way (requires Stripe India partnership), but the foreign-merchant flow is consistently card-only. International Visa, Mastercard, and Amex cards issued in India are accepted; billing happens in the merchant currency; settlement lands in a Stripe account outside India. Everything else that defines Indian digital payments today — UPI, NetBanking, Paytm/PhonePe/GPay direct integration, EMI, Cash on Delivery, UPI AutoPay — is explicitly outside the foreign-merchant Stripe surface.
The Indian-card decline reality
India has roughly 95 million credit cards in circulation. India also has more than 500 million active UPI users. The gap is the entire story of payment-method-fit for foreign merchants. When you accept only cards, you are addressing under one fifth of the country's digital-payment surface — and even that fifth comes with its own friction.
The friction is RBI policy, not Stripe policy. The Reserve Bank of India mandates 2-factor authentication on Indian-issued cards used internationally, plus card-on-file tokenization rules that took effect in 2022. Both rules raise the cost and complexity of an international authorisation flow that an Indian-issuing bank has to approve. The downstream effect is elevated decline rates compared to a domestic transaction routed through Indian rails.
Razorpay's 2026 Payment Gateway Reliability Report quantifies the range across the industry. The card-decline-rate slider in the calculator below uses that range as the input space (10–35%, default 20%); the UPI baseline is 0.8% per NPCI 2024 product statistics. Move the slider to your real number and the output is the dollar value of recoverable revenue you would unlock by adding UPI as a parallel rail.
What this costs you
Adjust the card decline rate to your real number. Output assumes UPI baseline decline of 0.8% (NPCI 2024). Recoverable revenue is the dollar value of declined card transactions you would convert by enabling UPI as a parallel rail.
Source: Razorpay Reliability Report 2026 + NPCI Product Statistics (2024).
Recoverable revenue
$115,200
per year, by adding UPI for India
≈ $9,600 / month recovered (vs current $10,000 declined to cards)
EximPe vs Stripe — at a glance
| Capability | EximPe | Stripe |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments from Indian customers | Yes | Yes |
| UPI payments | Yes | No |
| NetBanking | Yes | No |
| Indian wallets (Paytm / PhonePe / GPay) | Yes | No |
| UPI AutoPay (recurring) | Yes | No |
| RBI PA-CB license | Yes (final) | Not applicable |
| Settlement currency options | 30+ currencies | Stripe-supported set |
| Settlement timing | T+1 | Stripe standard |
| Indian entity required | No | No (foreign Stripe acct) |
| e-FIRA / FEMA documentation | Automated | Not applicable |
| Integration time | ~48 hours incl. KYC | Hours (existing Stripe) |
When Stripe alone is the right choice
Stripe alone is the right call when India is a small share of GMV and your Indian customers consistently use international cards. If India sits below five percent of revenue and the cards that do pay through generally clear the issuing bank, the cost of standing up a second PSP outweighs the recoverable revenue. Be specific with yourself about that math; do not extrapolate a peer's situation onto your own.
We are deliberate about saying so. Pages that take an antagonistic posture toward Stripe lose the buyers most likely to be reading them — sophisticated foreign founders who already trust their Stripe stack and are sniffing for whether the alternative is honest. The right framing is "Stripe is fine for global; here is what changes when India becomes a real share."
When to add EximPe alongside Stripe
The dual-PSP pattern is what most foreign merchants converging on India end up running. Stripe stays in place for every market it serves well today: US cards, EU cards, every customer with an international card and no UPI alternative. EximPe sits next to it and handles the Indian buyer specifically — UPI as the primary rail, NetBanking and cards routed domestically as fallbacks, settlement to your overseas bank in your preferred currency on T+1.
Both rails sit behind your existing checkout abstraction. The customer never sees two PSPs; they see your checkout, branched by their billing country (or, more cleanly, by the payment method they choose). Engineers integrate one EximPe SDK on top of the Stripe code already in production. Operations teams keep their Stripe dashboards for global reporting and use the EximPe dashboard for India-specific reconciliation, e-FIRA, and FEMA reporting that Stripe does not produce because it is not a PA-CB licensee.
Migration / integration walkthrough
Five-step setup. (1) KYC: complete EximPe onboarding on your foreign entity — no Indian entity required. (2) Sandbox keys: receive credentials, run test UPI and card flows against a test buyer in INR. (3) Checkout integration: drop EximPe into your existing checkout next to Stripe — Shopify and WooCommerce ship via plugin, custom Node and Python applications via the EximPe REST SDK. (4) Test transactions: run live INR amounts (₹1 minimum) end-to-end, confirm settlement to your overseas bank, confirm e-FIRA generation. (5) Go live: flip the production keys, route Indian buyers to EximPe at checkout, keep Stripe in place for everything else. Total elapsed time including KYC is approximately 48 hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about EximPe vs Stripe.
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