American payment giants such as GooglePay and AmazonPay are reportedly aiming to participate in the Indian central bank’s digital currency pilot.

Top U.S. tech giants such as Amazon and Google are reportedly looking to join India’s central bank digital currency pilot, as the Reserve Bank of India opens its digital currency initiative to non-bank payment firms.

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

Initially, only Indian banks were authorized to facilitate e-rupee transactions through their mobile applications. However, in April, the RBI announced that payment firms could soon be integrated into the pilot program as well.

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 emphasized the e-rupee’s privacy features, assuring the public that transactions would remain anonymous to some extent.

Despite these assurances, the CBDC’s adoption has been slow. By late June, the Reserve Bank of India reported achieving 1 million retail transactions with the e-rupee, but only after local banks started offering incentives to clients and distributed part of their employees’ salaries using the digital currency.

The RBI had previously urged banks to increase transactions to at least 1 million per day by late 2023 to test the system’s scalability. However, this push has since ceased, casting doubt on the future of the digital currency initiative due to the gap between incentivized metrics and actual user adoption.