Hong Kong Launches Digital Currency Pilot With 16 Firms Including HSBC, Bank of China, Alipay

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has announced the commencement of its e-HKD aviator which “will instrumentality heavy dives into imaginable usage cases successful six categories.” The aviator paves the mode for “the imaginable implementation of a retail cardinal slope integer currency (CBDC),” the cardinal banking instauration explained.

Pilot Program for e-HKD Begins

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) announced Thursday “the commencement of the e-HKD Pilot Programme.” The cardinal banking instauration revealed that 16 firms from the financial, payment, and exertion sectors person been selected to enactment successful the archetypal circular of e-HKD pilots for 2023. The HKMA detailed:

The pilots volition instrumentality heavy dives into imaginable usage cases successful six categories, including full-fledged payments, programmable payments, offline payments, tokenized deposits, colony of Web3 transactions, and colony of tokenized assets.

“The HKMA volition behaviour a bid of pilots successful adjacent collaboration with assorted stakeholders to analyse the usage cases, arsenic good arsenic implementation and plan issues relating to e-HKD,” the monetary authorization described, adding that it aims to stock cardinal learnings with the nationalist astatine Hong Kong Fintech Week 2023 successful November.

The companies participating successful the aviator programme see Alipay Financial Services, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Fubon Bank, Ripple Labs, Standard Chartered Bank, Hang Seng Bank, HSBC, Visa, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Mastercard Asia/Pacific, and Boston Consulting Group.

Eddie Yue, HKMA’s main executive, commented: “While the HKMA has not yet made a determination connected whether and erstwhile to present e-HKD, we are excited to kick-start the e-HKD Pilot Programme, which serves arsenic a tremendous accidental for the HKMA to collaborate with the manufacture successful exploring innovative usage cases and maximizing our readiness for a imaginable e-HKD.”

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority published its argumentation stance connected e-HKD successful September past twelvemonth arsenic portion of its “Fintech 2025” strategy. Two rounds of marketplace consultation were conducted: 1 connected high-level method plan and 1 connected cardinal argumentation and plan issues. A full of 75 responses were received during the consultation period.

The HKMA explained astatine the clip that it volition follow a three-rail approach. Rail 1 establishes the technological and ineligible foundations for the e-HKD, Rail 2 explores usage cases and conducts pilots, and Rail 3 focuses connected launching e-HKD based connected the outcomes of the erstwhile phases.

“The e-HKD Pilot Programme is simply a cardinal constituent of Rail 2 nether the HKMA’s three-rail attack successful paving the mode for the imaginable implementation of a retail cardinal slope integer currency (CBDC), i.e. e-HKD, successful the future,” the HKMA noted successful Thursday’s announcement.

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