In order to empower the differently abled (Divyaang) people of the country with digital banking services, easy-to-use innovative solutions for digital banking services such as digital payments, account opening, account statement, payment of utility bills, usage of debit/credit cards, etc., may be explored. This would provide equal opportunity to the physically challenged without any discrimination and enable them access in availing financial services.

RegTech, or Regulatory Technology, applies innovative capabilities and techniques to help financial institutions improve their regulatory governance, reporting, compliance and risk management. For example, classification of loans under priority sector needs to be compliant with priority sector lending guidelines issued by Reserve Bank of India. In addition, through efficient classification, banks are also able to monetize the priority sector portfolio through trading in Priority Sector Lending Certificates (PSLCs). While reporting of the priority sector data is fetched by RBI in an automated way, the classification of the loans at banks is a manual process. RegTech tools that facilitate automated classification of loans under priority sector as per prescribed guidelines and enable banks to comply with same shall be of immense use to the industry. Similarly, other RegTech solutions may be explored for efficient compliance by REs.

Retail CBDC brings immense scope for innovation which can have positive impact on the banking and financial services. While disbursal of social benefits could be one of the use case, offline use is considered another core feature of a retail CBDC (CBDC-R) and integral to the continued public access to central bank money. It is also key to financial inclusion and accessibility, where use of physical cash may be constrained by geographic remoteness and/ or a lack of a communications network or power infrastructure. We may explore such use cases/solutions for CBDC-R transactions, including transactions in offline mode, where the wallets must be able to independently verify the authenticity of any CBDC transaction without communicating with the server during the transactions, while mitigating the risk ‘of double spending’.