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Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said tokenisation is emerging as a defining development in the financial system and urged the Reserve Bank of India to further develop its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) capabilities as digital assets and financial platforms increasingly expand across borders.
Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Sitharaman said the successful pilot of a tokenised corporate bond by REC Limited under the Securities and Exchange Board of India's regulatory sandbox demonstrated how tokenisation and the digital rupee could work together to enable near-instantaneous settlement. "This Monday, the REC Limited, the electrification company, completed India's first tokenized corporate bond pilot under the SEBI regulatory sandbox. The bond and the digital rupee moved at the exact same instant," she said. "The day the payment is made, the transaction is closed," she added. Sitharaman said the achievement demonstrated the importance of the "money leg" in tokenisation architectures and highlighted the role of CBDCs in enabling monetary settlement. "Every tokenization architecture being tested across the world eventually returns to the foundational question: what is the money leg made of?" she said. She urged the RBI to advance both its wholesale and retail CBDC pilots and continue strengthening the capabilities of the digital rupee. The Finance Minister also highlighted the need for India to prepare its financial and digital infrastructure for increasingly borderless technology. "AI, fintech and digital platforms are, by their very nature, borderless," she said, noting that a product could be developed in Bengaluru, use infrastructure in another country, serve customers in Singapore and process data elsewhere. However, while technology can move almost instantaneously across borders, regulations remain largely national, she said. Sitharaman said differences in rules, governing data, licensing, cybersecurity, consumer protection, taxation and financial regulation increasingly influence whether Indian technology companies can successfully enter foreign markets. She suggested that a federated industry platform could give India's technology ecosystem a collective international voice and help companies navigate regulatory frameworks, build interoperable standards and expand overseas. She also cautioned that the speed enabled by tokenisation and other emerging technologies must be balanced with safeguards, saying faster transactions could also allow fraud, software errors and market shocks to spread more rapidly. (ANI)
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