India’s retail giant Reliance Retail has begun accepting retail payments via the Indian Government’s Digital Rupee across its stores in the country.
It has collaborated with Fintech Innoviti Technologies, Kotak Mahindra Bank and ICICI Bank to launch in-store support for digital rupee. The company launched the first in-store acceptance of the RBI-created and Blockchain-based Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The CBDC is the digital version of fiat money that will co-exist with hard cash.
The Reserve Bank of India has started the first phase of a retail CBDC pilot in four cities and involving four key banks late last year. Market experts believe that going forward, more retailers can follow the same track.
Reliance Retail operates more than 15,000 stores across 7,000+ cities which also include Reliance Trends, India’s largest fashion retail chain across India.
In a statement, V. Subramaniam, Director, Reliance Retail said, “This historic initiative of pioneering the digital currency acceptance at our stores is in line with the company’s strategic vision of offering the power of choice to Indian consumers. With more Indians willing to transact digitally, this initiative will help us provide yet another efficient and secure alternative payment method to customers at our stores.”
Rajeev Agrawal, Founder and CEO of Innoviti Technologies said, “Digital Rupee fulfils the need of consumers who still prefer the trust, safety and settlement finality of physical currency.”
CBDC can play a key role in providing access to digital payments without the requirement of a bank account and the access would be facilitated by a central bank-issued digital wallet.
Settlement in central bank money would reduce transaction costs by pre-empting the need for settlement guarantee infrastructure or for collateral to mitigate settlement risk.
