RBI Surpasses One Million Daily Digital Transaction Milestone In December
The Reserve Bank of India reached its one million daily transactions target in December. This digital leap was possible with the support of Indian banks which played a significant role in disbursing some employee benefits through the digital rupee (e-rupee) by year-end.
RBI’s e-rupee pilot was started in December 2022 but transactions averaged only 25,000 a day by the end of October. The target was earlier attempted by significantly linking its use case to the popular United Payments Interface (UPI), a framework facilitating peer-to-peer money transfer via mobile apps. However, employees' CBDC wallets finally proved to be the right chord to reach the top.
E-rupee has been devised as a digital alternative to physical cash and has been built using distributed-ledger technology.
Last month, some major private lenders and state-run banks reportedly disbursed amounts related to employee benefit schemes directly to CBDC employee wallets, a transfer usually done to employees' salary accounts. The lenders included HDFC Bank, IDFC First Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and IDBI Bank, as per reports.
Furthermore, reports mentioned that RBI expects non-financial firms to follow suit, looking forward to boosting future transactions.
Additionally, the central bank has also witnessed a steady growth in its user base. There are currently four million users, up from three million in December.
"We exceeded the milestone of 1 million e-rupee transactions on December 27, 2023," wrote Das in an end-of-year letter to RBI staff on 29 December 2023.
On the front of wholesale transactions, the RBI has been working towards broadening the scope of the CBDC's usage. In October, the RBI introduced CBDC in the inter-bank call market. However, there have been very few transactions made with the wholesale CBDC so far. Nevertheless, the RBI is not discouraged by this and is continuing to work towards promoting its usage.
