Reserve Bank sees no ‘policy case’ for digital Aussie dollar just yet
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is continuing to closely monitor the case for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) and is engaging with some other central banks on possible use cases, including for cross-border payments. So far, the central bank does not consider that a policy case has yet emerged for issuing a CBDC. The RBA has also been conducting research on wholesale CBDC at its in-house Innovation Lab, and is close to finalizing a project with a number of external parties to explore the implications of delivery-versus-payment settlement on a distributed ledger technology platform as well as other programmability features of tokenized CBDC and financial assets.
Vietnam plans to pilot central bank digital currency?
“Several news outlets in Vietnam have reported that country’s prime minister has instructed the State Bank of Vietnam to pilot a national digital currency based on blockchain. While it seems this will be a central bank digital currency (CBDC), some have reported that it will be a cryptocurrency. That may in part relate to the semantics of the terms “virtual” or “digital” currency.” However, I can find nothing about it on the prime minister’s website so Viet Nam doesn’t go onto my CBDC explorer tabulation just yet.
The Mobile Gender Gap Report 2021
The GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2021 highlights, so far the pandemic does not appear to have negatively impacted the overall gender gap in mobile ownership, which has remained relatively flat, nor the gender gap in mobile internet, which has improved this year – driven mostly by South Asia. Across low- and middle-income countries, 58 per cent of women now access mobile internet, with an estimated 112 million women going online for the first time in 2020. But access and use of mobile remains unequal; women are 7 per cent less likely than men to own a mobile and 15 per cent less likely to use mobile internet.
*For those interested in intra-day updates and news that didn’t make the Daily Digest cut, please check out my Diigo fintech bookmarks: https://www.diigo.com/user/kiffmeister/Fintech
