I’ve updated my tabulation of *retail* central bank digital currency (CBDC) to update Nigeria’s status to “launched” and to include Hungary (see below). I also recently updated my tabulation of recent *wholesale* CBDC experiments.
At the dawn of a new age – Money in the 21st century
The Central Bank of Hungary (MNB) has published a book that summarizes the theoretical considerations, the most important practical issues, the motives behind the potential creation of this new instrument and the opportunities offered by central bank digital currency (CBDC). It also covers CBDC monetary policy, financial stability, and cash flow impacts, as well as the issues of infrastructural implementation. [Read more]
Canada and the Digitalization of Money
An August 25, 2021 virtual workshop was convened with international and Canadian experts from the public and private sectors and from academia to discuss Canadian perspectives on the digitalization of money. It concluded that Canadian governments and service providers need to step up work on delivering a modernized payments system and secure data transfer to facilitate open banking. Secondly, Canada requires a thoroughly updated legislative framework for privacy and data management, and the adoption of industry standards for digital identification. And thirdly, existing regulatory frameworks are ill-suited to deal with new and emerging market structures. [Read more]
Update on Brazil’s Pix instant payments platform
The Central Bank of Brazil launched its instant payments platform Pix last November. Pix allows consumers and companies to make money transfers 24/7 without requiring debit or credit cards through a Pix alias or a QR Code. It is also free of charge for individuals. In March Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service was cleared to let its users send each other funds using the Visa and Mastercard card networks. It now has over 100 million users – in September over half the adult population used it at least once and total transaction volume was $100 billion. [Read more]
To get these updates sent to your inbox, please sign up here. Also, 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.
