Rel Retail is 1st large store chain to accept eRupee

Mumbai: Reliance Retail has become the first to deploy acceptance for the eRupee — or the central bank digital currency (CBDC) — at scale. The eRupee acceptance has been facilitated by Kotak and ICICI banks on a platform provided by Innoviti Technologies, which has a 76% market share of digital payment processing at enterprise retail.

Reliance Retail director V Subramaniam said the eRupee provided the benefit of a digital transaction without the cost as other digital payments have an interchange cost and credit cards have a merchant discount rate. At the same time, eRupee transactions do not have the disadvantage of cash-handling and they can be reconciled with invoices using the same solutions used for digital payments.

On Thursday, in-store payment acceptance via eRupee was launched at Reliance Retail’s Freshpik, which will be progressively extended to all Reliance Retail stores across the country once the eRupee goes beyond the RBI’s pilot phase.

Innoviti Technologies founder & CEO Rajeev Agrawal said that his company was the first to introduce dynamic QR-based in-store UPI payments, and a similar dynamic QR interface would be available for eRupee payments using the existing point of sale terminal.

Kotak Mahindra Bank president & chief digital officer Deepak Sharma said the bank’s merchant-acquiring division would reach out to clients for facilitating payment-acceptance using digital currency. Besides providing digital wallets to customers and placing indents with the RBI for issue of digital rupees, the bank would also facilitate breakdown of higher value tokens and return the same to the customers wallet as lower denomination change.