RBI Urges Payment Operators to Prepare for Post-Quantum Security

India’s payment operators have been urged to begin preparing for quantum-related cryptographic risk. In his September 11 Global Fintech Fest speech, RBI deputy governor Shirish Chandra Murmu described quantum readiness as a task for the payments ecosystem.

The speech stresses a timing problem: payment infrastructure has long operating cycles, while migration may take years. Encrypted information collected today could remain sensitive when more capable computers become available.

What the speech establishes

Murmu referred to an RBI expert committee on a Quantum Secure and Adaptive Financial Ecosystem. He also cited the BIS Innovation Hub’s Project Leap, which experimented with post-quantum digital signatures in liquidity transfers and required changes across multiple components.

The address calls for banks, operators, fintechs, suppliers and standards bodies to work together. It sets no compliance date or mandated algorithm. It does not select a commercial supplier, require a quantum-key-distribution network or establish a date when existing cryptography will fail.

Why coordination matters

A migration can succeed inside one application while failing at its interfaces. The useful questions concern which other systems must accept a new signature or key format, how compatibility will be tested and what happens when part of the network has not yet changed.

A sensible reporting scorecard would follow published inventories, interoperability tests and controlled transition plans. It would distinguish a successful experiment from a deployment serving ordinary transactions.

There is also a difference between confidentiality and authentication. A discussion of stored encrypted data should not be used to imply that every historical payment becomes forgeable in the same way. The system, algorithm and security objective matter.

The next milestone is a clearer public account of the expert committee’s work and any subsequent guidance. Until then, the speech is an important statement of direction. It is not a procurement order or evidence that a domestic supplier has already solved the transition.

Image: RBI deputy governor Shirish Chandra Murmu, pictured in coverage of his address.