Indian banks are witnessing roughly 15,000 retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) transactions per day, and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is aiming to take it to 1 million transactions per day by end of the current calendar year, said deputy governor T Rabi Sankar told reporters on the sidelines of the SME Finance Forum here today.
“It (retail CBDC) transactions is roughly around Rs 15,000 a day or so. We will have to take it to one million but initially our efforts over the last month and a half has been to make it interoperable with the UPI QR codes, and that process is done. Now, we will focus on the transactions,” he said.
Country’s largest lender State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, YES Bank and IDFC First Bank have till now enabled Unified Payments Interface (UPI) QR code interoperability with central bank digital currency (CBDC) payments.
RBI had launched a pilot CBDC programme in late 2022. In July, Sankar had said about 5,000 CBDC retail transactions were taking place each day. According to reports, due to lower volumes being seen in CBDC transactions, the central bank is looking to shore up the use-cases of CBDCs, including making the feature available in offline mode.
Separately, he also said that the RBI is focused at this point in time on regulating fintech industry through a self-regulatory organisation (SRO). Internally, the regulator is looking at what other things are possible which could help the fintech sector grow in an orderly manner.
Lastly, on inclusion of government bonds in the global bond index, the DG said at this point of time the only channel available for foreigners and NRIs to invest in India is through the FPI route. “If there is some other channel like Euroclearbility or something, if that opens up then that will be another way of settling it but that’s not open yet,” he said.