India’s central bank has urged the government to seek a formal agreement among BRICS members to link their central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Reuters reported citing two sources.
The initiative is aimed at simplifying cross-border payments for trade and tourism within the bloc and could lessen dependence on the US dollar amid heightened geopolitical frictions, the report said.
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According to the sources, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recommended that the proposal to interconnect CBDCs be placed on the agenda for the 2026 BRICS summit.
India is set to host the summit later this year.
The sources told the news agency this would be the first time a formal plan to link BRICS digital currencies is presented at a leaders’ meeting.
BRICS, originally formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has expanded to ten members with the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the UAE.
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By GlobalDataThe move could unsettle US, which has cautioned against initiatives designed to bypass the dollar.
US President Donald Trump has previously said the BRICS alliance is ‘anti-American’ and he threatened to impose tariffs on its members.
The RBI, India’s finance ministry and the central banks of China, Brazil and Russia did not reply to Reuters’ emailed queries.
The South African central bank declined to comment.
Details of the RBI proposal to connect BRICS CBDCs for cross-border trade finance and tourism have not previously been made public, according to the report.
The plan builds on a 2025 BRICS summit declaration in Rio de Janeiro, which called for greater interoperability among members’ payment systems to improve the efficiency of cross-border transfers.
The RBI has earlier signalled interest in linking India’s digital rupee with other countries’ CBDCs to speed up international payments and support wider use of the rupee.
At the same time, the central bank has stated that efforts to expand the rupee’s global role are not intended to drive de-dollarisation.
None of the BRICS states has fully rolled out a CBDC, but the five core members are all conducting pilot projects.
India’s CBDC, the e-rupee, launched in December 2022, has drawn around seven million retail users so far, while China has pledged to step up international use of the digital yuan.
To encourage adoption of the e-rupee, the RBI has enabled offline transactions, introduced programmability for government subsidy payments and allowed fintech firms to offer digital currency wallets.
One of the sources told Reuters that any BRICS digital currency link would require agreement on interoperable technology, governance standards and methods to handle uneven trade flows.
The person cautioned that reluctance among some members to adopt technology platforms developed elsewhere could slow the initiative, and that alignment on technology and regulation would be essential before concrete progress is made.
Both sources said one option under consideration for managing trade imbalances is the use of bilateral foreign exchange swap lines between central banks.
Previous attempts by Russia and India to expand the use of their local currencies in bilateral trade have run into difficulties. Russia accumulated sizeable rupee holdings that it struggled to deploy, prompting the RBI to permit investment of those balances in Indian bonds.
The second source said a working idea is to settle net positions from cross-border CBDC transactions on a weekly or monthly basis via these swap arrangements.
