Quick Take
- India hosts the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12 and 13, 2026, but backs no common BRICS currency.
- The real push is linking CBDCs and UPI to cut the 3 to 4 percent cost the 32 million-strong diaspora pays.
- Retail digital rupee in circulation fell 24 percent to Rs 771.7 crore by March 31, 2026.
The rupee took centre stage in New Delhi. India is hosting the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12 and 13, 2026, at Bharat Mandapam. Payments are on the table. A common BRICS currency is not.
India, which chairs BRICS in 2026, has said plainly that it does not back a single BRICS currency. On August 7, 2026, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said India was not in favour of one. RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra has called the payment proposals a discussion, not a decision.
What Is India Actually Proposing?
India wants BRICS members to link their central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, for cross-border payments. The pitch is cheaper, faster settlement between countries. It is not a new money.
The Reserve Bank of India put this idea on the 2026 summit agenda. The plan would connect India’s digital rupee, China’s digital yuan and other member CBDCs. India and the UAE have already signed a deal to link their CBDCs and run joint pilots.
Why Does This Matter for Founders?
Here is why this matters to a fintech founder. India’s diaspora numbers 32 million people. They pay 3 to 4 percent on average to send money home through old correspondent banking channels. That cost is the target.
On September 8, 2026, at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked India’s fintech industry to link UPI with more countries. He framed UPI as India’s next export. The message was clear.
UPI already reaches beyond India. It is live in 11 foreign countries for acceptance or remittances, including the UAE, Singapore, France, Sri Lanka and Mauritius. In June 2026, UPI went live in Greece. On July 30, 2026, it connected with the Maldives payment system.
How Strong Is the Digital Rupee?
The digital rupee is the other rail. It reached about 7 million retail users by early 2026. That is a real base. It is still tiny next to UPI, which has more than 400 million users.
The honest number is less flattering. Retail digital rupee in circulation fell to Rs 771.7 crore as on March 31, 2026. A year earlier it stood at Rs 1,016.5 crore. That is a drop of about 24 percent, even as the RBI widened its pilots.
The RBI has been candid about the reason. Early incentives drove the old figure. As those faded, the number normalised. The central bank is now testing specific uses, such as food subsidy payments in Gujarat, Puducherry and Chandigarh.
What Are the Hurdles?
Cross-border links do cut costs where they exist. The India-Singapore UPI-PayNow link, live since 2023, more than halved a transfer cost that ran near 5 percent. India has also joined Project Nexus, a plan to connect the fast-payment systems of several countries at once.
There are real hurdles. Interoperability between different CBDCs is hard. Governance rules must be agreed. Trade imbalances are a known problem. Russia built up large rupee balances under local-currency trade and struggled to spend them.
What this means for you: If you build in cross-border fintech, the opportunity is in the plumbing, compliance, foreign-exchange handling and settlement software around these new rails, not in a BRICS currency that does not exist.
StartupFeed Insight
The headline everyone wants is “BRICS currency”. The number that matters is 24 percent, the fall in retail digital rupee in circulation to Rs 771.7 crore. That gap tells the real story. India is not building a rival currency. It is building rails, slowly, and the adoption is not there yet. For founders, that is the opening. The rails are public infrastructure, but the compliance layer, the foreign-exchange tooling and the merchant products around them are not built. By the close of 2027, expect the first serious Indian startups selling CBDC and cross-border settlement software to banks, not to consumers.
— Avinash Mishra, Business Correspondent
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