BRICS countries are exploring ways to connect their domestic fast-payment systems and central bank digital currencies, potentially creating new payment corridors that could make cross-border transactions faster and cheaper, according to Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra. Speaking at the FIBAC 2026 conference in Mumbai on August 11, Malhotra said cross-border payments are an area of common interest among BRICS members because of the substantial opportunity to reduce transaction costs. The discussions include two potentially complementary approaches: linking existing instant-payment networks, such as India’s Unified Payments Interface, with equivalent systems in other countries, and establishing interoperability between central bank digital currencies.
The proposals remain at an early stage and no common BRICS payment system has been approved. India, which is hosting the 2026 BRICS summit, has nevertheless been pushing the issue higher on the group’s agenda. The RBI earlier proposed that BRICS members examine connecting their CBDCs to facilitate international payments. The initiative could eventually create government-backed digital settlement channels that bypass some of the intermediaries currently involved in moving money between countries.
Fast-Payment Networks Could Go International
The more immediately achievable part of the proposal may be linking national fast-payment systems. India’s UPI demonstrates how dramatically domestic payment infrastructure can reduce transaction friction. Payments between participating banks can be completed almost instantly and at very low cost. International payments remain considerably more complicated. A cross-border transfer can involve correspondent banks, foreign-exchange conversion, compliance checks and multiple settlement systems. Those additional layers increase both the cost and the time required to move money. India is already pursuing that strategy outside BRICS. The RBI is a founding participant in Project Nexus, an initiative developed with the Bank for International Settlements to connect fast-payment systems across multiple countries.
Extending similar interoperability across BRICS would potentially create a substantially larger network. The grouping has expanded beyond Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and now includes major emerging economies representing a significant share of the world’s population, trade and economic output. That scale makes even relatively small reductions in payment costs economically meaningful, particularly for remittances and smaller cross-border transactions.
CBDCs Could Take Integration Further
Unlike cryptocurrencies or privately issued stablecoins, CBDCs are direct digital representations of sovereign currencies issued or backed by central banks. India has already been experimenting with its digital rupee, or e₹, through retail and wholesale pilots. The RBI said in its 2025-26 annual report that it plans to broaden digital-rupee use cases, including welfare payments, while continuing to test CBDC applications for cross-border transactions. If different BRICS CBDCs became interoperable, a transaction could potentially move directly between sovereign digital-currency systems rather than passing through several commercial correspondent banks. That could shorten settlement times and reduce counterparty and reconciliation costs.
Each country has different rules covering capital flows, privacy, sanctions, anti-money-laundering controls and foreign-exchange management. Central banks would also need to agree on technical standards governing interoperability and settlement. China already operates a large digital-yuan pilot, while India continues expanding the e₹. Other BRICS members are at different stages of CBDC development, making a fully interconnected system more difficult than simply linking mature instant-payment networks. The initiative also fits India’s broader push to increase the international use of the rupee.
Malhotra said the RBI continues working to encourage greater use of local currencies in trade and international payments. That objective is sometimes characterized as BRICS attempting to create a replacement for the US dollar. The current proposal is considerably narrower. Connecting payment systems does not require the creation of a common BRICS currency, nor does it automatically remove the dollar from international trade. Instead, interoperability would make it easier for countries to settle transactions directly in their existing currencies when counterparties choose to do so. Cross-border payments are one of the areas where blockchain-based stablecoins have gained traction because conventional international transfers can remain slow and expensive. If central banks can connect instant-payment systems and CBDCs while preserving regulated settlement, they could reproduce some of those advantages inside sovereign financial infrastructure.
If those discussions eventually produce interoperable fast-payment systems and CBDCs, the result could be a cross-border settlement network built not around a new currency, but around faster connections between the currencies BRICS countries already use.
