Public sector lenders State Bank of India (SBI) and Bank of Baroda has received encouraging response from customers for the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or digital rupee. Country’s largest lender has recorded over 900,000 transactions from 400,000 lakh users since December 1 last year. The number of CBDC users for Bank of Baroda has reached 250,000.
“The pilot of CBDC has been successful. We have 900,000 plus transactions from December 1 last year and have onboard over 40,000 merchants,” Balaji Rajagopalan, Chief Technology Officer, SBI said on the sidelines of banking conference FIBAC 2023 organised by FICCI.
Bank of Baroda is targeting to increase the number of CBDC users to 1 million by the end of current financial year.
““As we are increasing number of CBDC users, the number of transactions is also growing,” Joydeep Dutta Roy, executive director, of Bank of Baroda told reporters at the same event.
The number of transactions per day has increased to over 2,000 from 200-300 transactions during the initial days, he said.
The central bank has set a target of a million CBDC transactions per day by the end December this year under the CBDC pilot, which was launched in December 1, 2022. As of now, 13 banks are participating in the CBDC pilot in 80 cities. As per the RBI, around 15,000 digital rupee transactions were taking place per day as of September.
Bankers say that the number of CBDC users is bound to grow significantly going forward as the banks have started implementing interoperability between CBDC and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). After launch of this feature, the users can now use their digital currency available in their digital rupee wallet at shops where UPI is accepted.
Bank of Baroda and SBI have enabled CBDC UPI QR Interoperability functionality for their users.
“CBDC UPI interoperability will further accelerate the adoption of digital rupee among customers as it will pave the way for seamless transactions between customers and merchants,” added Roy.