Amazon, Google, Walmart seek to join India’s CBDC pilot: report

American payment giants such as GooglePay and AmazonPay are reportedly aiming to participate in the Reserve Bank of India’s digital currency pilot.

With the Reserve Bank of India opening up its digital currency initiative to non-bank payment companies, leading US tech giants such as Amazon and Google are also reportedly considering joining India’s central bank digital currency pilot project.

AmazonPay, GooglePay and Walmart-backed PhonePe have shown interest in facilitating transactions with India’s CBDC, known as the e-rupee, according to sources cited by Reuters. Indian fintech firms Cred and Mobikwik have also applied to join the pilot program, though the timeline for their participation remains unclear.

Initially, only Indian banks were authorised to facilitate e-rupee transactions through their mobile apps. However, in April, the RBI announced that payment companies too could soon be integrated into the pilot programme.

India’s push for digital currency adoption

Launched in December 2022, the e-rupee represents a tokenized version of the Indian rupee issued by the RBI. Following its launch, RBI officials highlighted the privacy features of the e-rupee, assuring the public that transactions will remain anonymous to some extent.

Despite these assurances, CBDC adoption has been slow. By the end of June, the Reserve Bank of India reported 1 million retail transactions in e-rupee, but this only happened after local banks started offering incentives to their customers and distributing a portion of their employees’ salaries using the digital currency.

The RBI had earlier urged banks to increase transactions to at least 1 million per day by the end of 2023 to test the scalability of the system. However, that push has since ended, casting doubt on the future of the digital currency initiative due to the gap between incentivised metrics and actual user adoption.