TCS’ Quartz to help central banks in roll-out and use of digital currencies: Check details

India's largest software exporter Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Tuesday announced a solution which will aid in their roll-outs and usage of digital currencies.

The Tata Group company, in its exchange filing on Tuesday, said, it has enhanced its blockchain solutions platform Quartz to enable central and commercial banks to support the entire lifecycle of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) issuance, book-keeping and transactions.

TCS’ award-winning Quartz solution provides the capability to issue, trade, and settle a variety of traditional as well as tokenized assets, and handle payment transactions.

Quartz bridges the conventional and digital world, helping organizations manage issuance and transactions of various kinds of digital assets, without the need for a central third party.

The central banks will be able to manage the issuance and distribution of CBDCs while commercial banks can transact with other banks and payment services providers using CBDCs as well as offer their customers the ability to hold CBDC balances, TCS said in its release.

The company's president for banking, financial services and insurance products and platforms, Vivekanand Ramgopal said that having the capability was fundamental to TCS, which counts on the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) segment as its largest business vertical.

Without giving a size of the opportunity, Ramgopal said having the CBDC solution is "incredibly important" strategically and added that it is already working with multiple stakeholders in the system.

The company feels a wholesale CBDC has clear advantages over the retail one and may be the first one to be introduced by many countries, Ramgopal said.

The Reserve Bank of India, which is mandated to launch the CBDC in FY23, is also mulling to introduce the wholesale CBDC first because of the advantages.

Ramgopal said we should expect a few countries to make progress and launch their CBDCs in 2023, and added that the lag between the wholesale and retail will not be too long.

The TCS solution can support both wholesale and retail use cases, he said, stressing that there will be a very fast adoption of CBDC once it is launched.

The solution will conform to all the regulations on privacy, Ramgopal said, adding that it is possible to "consciously programme" it for anonymity, especially for small value transactions.

(With PTI Inputs)