India advances plan to link BRICS digital currencies to speed cross-border payments

India’s central bank has proposed putting interoperability between BRICS central-bank digital currencies on the agenda for next year’s BRICS summit, signalling a formal, exploratory push to study technical connections that could streamline intra-bloc payments. Sources say the measure is procedural rather than a binding commitment: it aims to start feasibility work and to surface choices about messaging protocols, ledger compatibility and final settlement locations. The proposal is explicitly framed to simplify payments for trade and tourism by shortening chains that currently rely on multiple correspondent-banking links. That practical objective steers the conversation away from political notions of a shared reserve currency and toward concrete engineering and governance trade-offs. Parallel work elsewhere — including China-backed experimental CBDC rails that have recorded substantial cross-border settlement volumes and growing operational activity — demonstrates that CBDC-based channels can carry meaningful flows at scale, but also highlights how design choices shape which participants gain dominance in on-ledger value. Implementation in the BRICS context will require reconciling different regulatory regimes, data-sovereignty requirements and liquidity-management practices, as well as building common approaches to sanctions screening, anti-money-laundering controls and compliance tooling. Technical options under consideration range from light-touch API connectors to intermediary settlement hubs or tighter ledger interoperability; each carries trade-offs in latency, counterparty exposure and resilience to external pressure. The move gives India agenda-setting influence as host of the next BRICS meeting and could accelerate pilot projects, capacity-building and standardization efforts among member central banks. At the same time, uneven technical choices or unresolved governance could fragment rather than unify cross-border settlement, creating incompatible rails and market segmentation. In short, the RBI’s proposal is an early, low-commitment step that uses interoperability work as a diplomatic and technical lever — its ultimate significance will depend on detailed design, which must account for both the operational precedents set by other experiments and the geopolitical sensitivities among BRICS members.