Google, Amazon, Walmart seek to join Indian central bank digital currency project

Mumbai — GooglePay, Walmart-backed PhonePe and AmazonPay are among five payment firms seeking to join the Indian central bank’s digital currency pilot by offering transactions via the e-rupee, three sources involved in the discussions say.

Indian fintech firms Cred and Mobikwik were the other two that had applied to join the pilot, the sources said.

The Reserve Bank of India started a pilot for the e-rupee, a digital alternative to the physical currency, in December 2022. After an initial surge, e-rupee transactions have declined, reflecting the struggle central banks globally have faced in popularising digital currencies.

Google Pay and Amazon Pay are payments applications offered by Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com, respectively, that facilitate retail payments over India's widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

Initially, the central bank had permitted only banks to offer e-rupee via their mobile applications, but in April it said payment firms could also offer e-rupee transactions via their platform once approved by the RBI.

Payment firms are working closely with the Reserve Bank of India and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the domestic payments authority, and are expected to roll out access to e-rupee over the next three to four months, the sources said.

The sources declined to be identified because they are not authorised to speak to media.

While transactions using the digital currency had risen to over 1 million a day late last year, they have since declined sharply to about 100,000-200,000 a day, one of the sources said.

Allowing popular payment firms to offer e-rupee should help lift volumes by widening the user base, the second source said.

Together these five payment firms account for over 85% of digital payments via UPI, which averages about 13-billion transactions each month.

While continuing to try to popularise the e-rupee, the central bank had no immediate plans to do a full-scale launch of the digital currency, the second source said.

“The e-rupee is likely to stay in the pilot stage for the next couple of years,” the source said.

Reuters