Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday said that it’ll commence pilot launches of Digital Rupee (e₹) for specific use cases. As per the notification, the first pilot in Digital Rupee will be in the Wholesale segment (e₹-W) and will commence on Tuesday. RBI also said that it’ll commence the pilot of Digital Rupee – Retail segment (e₹-R) within a month.
Nine banks, viz., State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, IDFC First Bank and HSBC have been identified for participation in the pilot.
“The use case for this pilot is settlement of secondary market transactions in government securities. Use of e₹-W is expected to make the inter-bank market more efficient. Settlement in central bank money would reduce transaction costs by preempting the need for settlement guarantee infrastructure or for collateral to mitigate settlement risk. Going forward, other wholesale transactions, and cross-border payments will be the focus of future pilots, based on the learnings from this pilot” RBI said.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her Budget speech had announced that India would lunch digital currency in the current financial year.