HDFC Bank Onboards Over 1 Lakh Customers In CBDC Pilot Program

HDFC Bank, one of India's leading private sector banks, has successfully onboarded over 1 lakh customers and more than 1.7 lakh merchants for the CBDC trial programme. An effort by the bank intends to investigate the possibility of a digital currency, commonly referred to as a central bank digital currency (CBDC), and comprehend its ramifications for the Indian financial ecosystem, Reuters Reported.

The Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) pilot programme, a tokenized digital form of the rupee for wholesale and retail early December, was introduced by the Reserve Bank of India in November of last year.

The monetary body plans to boost the number of digital rupee transactions from the current 5,000-10,000 per day to 10 lakh per day by the end of the year, according to RBI Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar earlier this week.

There are already 13 banks participating in the trial, increased from the original eight banks, and there are currently 13 lakh CBDC users, including 3 lakh merchants.

Only 1 lakh users were registered as of the end of April this year; this number has since grown to 13 lakh, according to Sankar.

The central bank declared CBDC interoperability with UPI systems in June after the introduction.

With the introduction of the UPI QR code on Thursday, HDFC Bank, which earlier this month completed a massive USD 40 billion merger with its parent company HDFC, claimed to be one of the first banks to complete the integration process. This will increase the use of the CBDC in regular transactions.

Basic QR payment acceptance terminals can support scan and pay functions from a variety of factors and payment choices when the QR code is interoperable.

Customers can access money transactions in their CBDC wallet via the UPI QR code, which eliminates the need to scan several QR codes at the same retailer, as one of the main advantages of the interoperable UPI QR code with the CBDC.

The 26 cities that HDFC Bank currently supports for e-rupee payments include all of the major metropolises as well as smaller ones like Guwahati, Bhubaneshwar, Indore, Gangtok, Lucknow, Bhopal, Kochi, Patna, Shimla, Goa, Ranchi, Jaipur, Varanasi, Nagpur, Pondicherry, Visakhapatnam, and Vijayawada.