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DFS Secretary M Nagaraju on Monday urged fintechs to focus on driving offline payment solutions to enhance financial inclusions. "I would like to request fintechs to focus their attention on payment solutions for offline payment," Nagaraju said at the CII Summit on Financial Inclusion and FinTech. He highlighted that financial inclusion is increasingly recognised as a major factor in economic growth and poverty alleviation on a global scale. He pointed out that seven of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) are directly connected to financial inclusion. This suggests the importance of improving access to financial services for the unbanked and under-served populations, he said. To illustrate progress made in India, he recalled data from before 2014, when only about 35 per cent of adults in India had access to a bank account, as estimated by the Global Findex Database. In response to this situation, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) was launched in
Central bank digital currency (CBDC), to be launched this year, could become a tool for reducing time and cost for cross-border transactions, Reserve Bank Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar said on Wednesday. The RBI has proposed to launch on a pilot basis this year, as announced in the Budget by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. In the Union Budget for 2022-23, the finance minister had said the RBI would roll out a digital equivalent to the rupee in the current financial year. "We have to understand that internationalisation of CBDC is crucial to addressing the payments issue that bodies like G-20 and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are dealing with now," he said at India Ideas Summit. Observing that India has an excellent, cheap and fast domestic payments system, he said the cost of cross-border payment, however, is still high. There is a lot of scope for improvement in terms of both cost and speed, he noted. CBDC is probably the most efficient answer to this, he said, .