Bank of Baroda (Bank), one of India’s leading public sector banks, today announced that it has enabled CBDC UPI QR Interoperability functionality for pilot users on the Bank of Baroda Digital Rupee app.
The launch of this feature will pave the way for seamless transactions between a customer and merchant. For customers, it provides ease and convenience to use the Bank of Baroda Digital Rupee app to scan any UPI QR at a merchant outlet and transact. Merchants can now accept digital rupee [CBDC-R] payments from customers using their existing QR payment acceptance terminal, without being onboarded as a CBDC merchant.
At the launch, Joydeep Dutta Roy, Executive Director, Bank of Baroda said, “CBDC UPI QR interoperability will further accelerate the adoption of digital rupee [CBDC-R] among customers and provide wider payment acceptance infrastructure to promote usage of digital rupee at merchant outlets. Customers can now use their digital currency available in their digital rupee [CBDC-R] wallet and scan to pay across any UPI QR code. Similarly, merchants need to only display their existing single QR code, which can accept payments in both CBDC and UPI. With this, we believe that the digital rupee ecosystem can scale up quickly.”
CBDC UPI QR interoperability functionality on the Bank of Baroda Digital Rupee app is being rolled out to pilot users across 26 cities (i.e. Delhi, Mumbai, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Guwahati, Gangtok, Indore, Bhopal, Pune, Lucknow, Patna, Kochi, Shimla, Goa, Jaipur, Kolkata, Chennai, Ranchi, Nagpur, Visakhapatnam, Varanasi, Pondicherry, and Vijayawada) in a phased manner starting with Android, and will be available to iOS users shortly.
A Reserve Bank of India (RBI) initiative, Digital Rupee is legal tender issued by the Central Bank in Digital form. Bank of Baroda is one of the pilot banks. The CBDC UPI QR interoperability is an extension to the CBDC-Retail pilot launched by the RBI last year.
