Payments

India’s central bank to deploy QR-enabled vending machines to dispense coins

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February 9, 2023

The Reserve Bank of India plans to use cashless technology to promote the use of coins, according to a livemint.com report.

The central bank will launch a pilot project to provide QR code-based vending machines in 12 cities to dispense coins to residents. The purpose, according to RBI governor Shaktikanta Das, is to make coins more accessible.

The machines will use the Unified Payments Interface, a payment system that facilitates interbank, peer-to-peer and person-to-merchant transactions, to dispense coins against debit to the user's account. The UPI system developed by the National Payments Corp. of India is already used on mobile devices to transfer funds between bank accounts.

Based on the response to the pilot, the RBI will issue guidelines for banks to use the machines to distribute coins.