Russia and India move closer to integrating their payment infrastructures through a new cross-border project, aiming to facilitate trade within BRICS and reduce reliance on third-country currencies, ahead of the upcoming BRICS summit in New Delhi.
Russia and India have moved a step closer to linking their payment systems, with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, BRICS Pay India and Moscow-based JSC BRICS Pay agreeing to work on a cross-border payments project for the BRICS bloc. The plan is to study how BRICS Pay could be integrated with India’s domestic infrastructure and to prepare pilot services for settlements in national currencies, according to Interfax.
The agreement was announced on 11 September during Vladimir Putin’s engagements in India, ahead of the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi. Interfax said JSC BRICS Pay will act as the technology partner, while BRICS Pay India will coordinate with banks, payment service providers, merchants and other local market participants.
Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the RDIF, said modern payment infrastructure is essential to sustaining trade and investment across BRICS, according to Interfax. He argued that BRICS Pay should complement national systems rather than replace them, creating a more interoperable network for cross-border transactions.
The initiative fits into a broader push by BRICS governments and central banks to reduce frictions in payments between member states. The bloc’s finance ministers and central bank governors have already asked the BRICS Payment Task Force to keep working on solutions that are faster, cheaper and more accessible, while Indian trade minister Piyush Goyal has called for wider use of national currencies in trade, according to the related reports.
India’s digital payments system gives the project particular significance. The Reserve Bank of India has also been part of discussions about links between fast-payment networks and central bank digital currencies, and a retail-payment demonstrator was tested at the BRICS Business Forum in Moscow in 2024, showing that the idea has been under active development for some time.
If the current pilot phase succeeds, the project could provide BRICS members with a practical route to settle transactions without relying as heavily on third-country currencies or conventional international channels. For Russia and India, that could make bilateral trade easier to manage; for BRICS more broadly, it could become another building block in the effort to create a more independent financial architecture.
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