FM urges RBI to advance CBDC, sharpen digital Rupee capabilities amid tokenisation push
At a fintech industry event, the Finance Ministry urged the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to advance both the wholesale and retail pilots of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the digital Rupee, and continue strengthening its capabilities amid a broader push toward asset "tokenisation."
The remarks followed completion of India's first tokenised corporate bond pilot under a securities regulator's regulatory sandbox, in which bond transfer and digital Rupee payment settled simultaneously.
The Finance Ministry noted that tokenisation can eliminate intermediaries and make asset transfers near-instantaneous, but cautioned that the same speed could let errors, fraud, or market shocks propagate faster.
The comments were framed around the emerging role of tokenisation, agentic artificial intelligence, and quantum computing in reshaping financial-market infrastructure.
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) — the Digital Rupee (e₹)
CBDC is a sovereign digital currency issued and backed by a country's central bank, functioning as a digital form of legal-tender currency rather than a private or decentralised asset. In India, the RBI issues the Digital Rupee (e₹) under a legal framework amended specifically to enable digital-currency issuance.
The Finance Ministry's call to "advance" CBDC pilots directly concerns scaling up both the CBDC-W and CBDC-R pilots launched under the 2022 RBI Act amendment, situating the digital Rupee as central-bank money infrastructure for a tokenised financial system.
Tokenisation of Financial Assets
Tokenisation, in financial-market infrastructure, refers to representing ownership of a real-world asset (a bond, a deposit, a security) as a digital token on a shared ledger, enabling instantaneous, intermediary-light transfer and settlement instead of the multi-day, multi-party settlement chains typical of traditional markets.
Key Details
- The "money leg" question the Finance Ministry raised — what settles the payment side of a tokenised trade — is central to tokenisation design: it can be a tokenised bank deposit, a stablecoin, or central-bank digital currency (CBDC); using CBDC as the money leg gives Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) settlement finality backed by the central bank itself.
- The cited tokenised corporate bond pilot was run under a securities regulator's regulatory sandbox framework, which allows live but limited-scale testing of new financial technology under regulatory supervision before wider rollout.
- Faster settlement (near-instant atomic DvP) reduces counterparty and settlement risk but, as flagged, also compresses the time available to detect and contain errors, fraud, or systemic shocks.
The Finance Ministry linked the tokenised bond pilot's use of digital Rupee as the settlement currency to its broader appeal for the RBI to deepen CBDC capability, since any large-scale tokenisation of Indian financial assets will need a robust, RBI-backed digital money leg.
- RBI Act, 1934 amended via the Finance Act, 2022 (Gazette notification, 30 March 2022) to enable issuance of a central bank digital currency.
- CBDC pilots: Wholesale (CBDC-W) launched 1 November 2022; Retail (CBDC-R) launched 1 December 2022.
- CBDC-W use case: settlement of secondary-market government securities transactions; CBDC-R: general-purpose digital cash for the public.
- The remarks were made at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai, alongside references to tokenisation, agentic AI, and quantum computing as emerging financial-infrastructure themes.
- The referenced tokenised corporate bond pilot was executed under a regulatory sandbox and settled using the digital Rupee as the payment leg.