NIC Asia Bank and NCHL Sign Agreement for NepalPay Domestic Card Scheme Membership

Kathmandu — NIC Asia Bank has signed an agreement with Nepal Clearing House Limited (NCHL) to obtain the Principal Membership of the NPS–NCS and the Domestic Card Scheme "NepalPay Card." The agreement was signed by NIC Asia Bank’s CEO Sujit Kumar Shakya and NCHL’s CEO Nileshman Singh Pradhan.

Recently, NCHL announced the completion of the NPS–NCS infrastructure and urged banks and financial institutions to integrate their card switch systems to enable issuing and acquiring services under Nepal’s own domestic card scheme—NepalPay Card. Following this, many banks and financial institutions have started joining the NPS–NCS network and NepalPay Card ecosystem.

With the commercial rollout of the NepalPay card system, NIC Asia Bank will be able to issue NepalPay Cards to its customers and facilitate domestic card transactions.

NPS–NCS is being developed as a central card switch to establish interoperability among different card switches, and to manage routing and settlement of domestic card transactions under a unified national system.

Once fully implemented, the system is expected to reduce the cost of domestic card transactions, ensure data localization, and strengthen Nepal’s digital payments ecosystem by enabling the development of innovative digital payment tools.

NCHL currently provides services to more than 54 banks and financial institutions, most PSOs and PSPs, and over 100 non-banking institutions through various national payment systems.

The implementation of the NPS–NCS and NepalPay Card is expected to elevate Nepal’s card ecosystem to a new level. NIC Asia Bank, one of the leading banks in the country, has been offering advanced digital and banking services through its 360 branches, 115 extension counters, 41 branchless banking centers, and 649 ATMs nationwide.