BEIJING: The Digital Currency Institute of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), as well as the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates (CBUAE), joined the Multiple CBDC (m-CBDC) Bridge, a central bank digital currency project for cross-border foreign currency payments, initiated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the Bank of Thailand (BoT).
Supported by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub Centre in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the cross-border payments project aims to develop a proof-of-concept prototype to facilitate real-time cross-border foreign exchange payments on distributed ledger technology.
Meanwhile, it will foster a conducive environment for more central banks in Asia and other regions to jointly study to improve the cross-border payment capabilities of financial infrastructure to solve the problems of low efficiency, high cost, and low transparency in cross-border payments.
The participating central banks will evaluate the m-CBDC Bridge project’s feasibility for cross-border fund transfers, international trade settlement, and capital market transactions in their own jurisdictions.
For years, China has been a relatively cashless society, with millions of mobile payment users paying with either Tencent’s WeChat Pay or Alibaba’s Alipay every day. Per the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), banks in China handled non-cash mobile payments of $49.27 trillion in 2019, more than 25 percent from the previous year.
–The Daily Mail-CGTN
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