India Wants BRICS Nations to Link Digital Currencies

India’s central bank has reportedly proposed that BRICS countries link their digital currencies.

The goal here is to ease cross-border trade and tourism payments and reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, Reuters reported Monday (Jan. 19) citing two sources familiar with the matter.

These sources said the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recommended to the government that a proposal connecting the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) be included on the agenda for this year’s summit of BRICS nations, which includes China, India, Brazil and Russia.

According to Reuters, the proposal expands on a declaration last year at a BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, calling for interoperability between members’ payment systems to make cross-border transactions more efficient.

The report added that the RBI has expressed interest in linking India’s digital rupee with CBDCs from other countries to expedite cross-border transactions and strengthen its currency’s global usage. However, the central bank says this effort is not designed to weaken the dollar.

For the currency linking project to work, elements such as interoperable technology, governance rules and ways to deal with imbalanced trade volumes would be among the topics up for discussion, one of the sources told Reuters.

This source stressed that hesitation among members to adopt technological platforms from other countries could hinder work on the proposal and that consensus on tech and regulation would be needed for progress to occur.

Meanwhile, last week saw a report that a group of central and commercial banks were stepping up testing of the Agora cross-border payments project.

Announced in 2024, Project Agora — from the Greek word for “marketplace” — is an initiative to develop a multicurrency unified ledger melding tokenized commercial bank deposits with wholesale central bank money, using a programmable platform that features smart contracts.

These projects follow a year in which cross-border payments were “rewired” by things like artificial intelligence (AI) and orchestration, as PYMNTS wrote last month.

“Banks, FinTechs and corporates stopped debating which rail would ‘win’ cross-border payments,” that report said. “Instead, they built systems to use all of them, spanning cards, ACH, real-time payment networks, local clearing systems, alternative payment methods (APMs) and, in specific corridors, blockchain-based settlement.”

After all, the report added, 2025 was  marked by tariff turbulence, volatile demand and a tougher working capital environment. Faster, more predictable cross-border payments in this context can present a competitive advantage.

“The unsung hero of this transformation was orchestration: the intelligence layer that made complexity manageable and turned fragmented infrastructure into a streamlined transaction flow,” PYMNTS wrote.