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"A high-level ECB task force is currently examining the pros and cons of introducing a digital euro, which could be used by intermediaries or even by citizens through their electronic devices for their day-to-day spending needs. However, our analysis of the opportunities and challenges of CBDC should not discourage or crowd out market-led initiatives aimed at introducing private electronic means of payment with similar features in terms of user needs."

"The Federal Reserve has released message specifications for the initial launch of its FedNow Service for instant payments based on the standard set by the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. The FedNow ISO 20022 specifications define the message flows and formats that the service will leverage when operational in 2023."

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) has launched a new instant payment system dubbed "sarie" that will allow customers of the banking sector to send and receive low-value local transfers, 24 hours a day, at low fees not exceeding one riyal, in addition to other services and features provided by the system to beneficiaries such as using the mobile number as an alternative identifier for the IBAN number for transfers between banks, and the possibility of verifying the details of the account of the party receiving the transfer before the actual transfer.

The European Commission has published a roadmap, in the form of an inception impact assessment, on instant payments. The impact assessment to follow will investigate whether (i) new legislation is needed in this field, (ii) non-legislative measures would be appropriate, or (ii) other policy options are suitable.

The State Bank of Pakistan launched a new instant digital payment system in a bid to boost financial inclusion and government revenue in the country where only a fraction of economic transactions occur on the books. The new system, called "Raast" or "direct way", will be rolled out in three phases culminating in early 2022. Developed through a multi-year collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and support from the World Bank, Britain and the United Nations, one goal for Raast is to boost involvement of women in the formal economy. https://www.sbp.org.pk/press/2021/Pr-11-Jan-21.pdf

"The main gap, or next frontier in terms of central banking activities would be to find efficient ways to connect our fast payment systems so that they can be used by citizens to transfer remittances to send money back home, to send money across borders, so that cryptocurrencies would be less needed in the first place."

This paper by a Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) staffer sheds light on Australia's fast real-time retail payments system, the New Payments Platform (NPP). It concludes that there is no strong case for the RBA to issue a retail central bank digital currency given that the NPP and the safer Next Generation Banknote series.

"[A central bank digital currency] could take a variety of forms, the benefits and costs of which the ECB and other central banks are currently investigating, being mindful of their broader consequences on financial intermediation."

"etwork infrastructure to facilitate the secure availability of funds in real-time*. With Mastercard Send, PayPal users can transfer their account balances to eligible Mastercard cards seamlessly and conveniently, typically within seconds.

The ECB has welcomed an initiative by some of Europe's top banks to explore the development of a rival payment system to challenge the dominance of Visa and Mastercard and the threat from Chinese and US Big Tech firms. Backed by twenty French and German banks, the The Pan European Payment System Initiative (Pepsi) would seeks handle all forms of cashless transactions.

Instead of increasing its size and scope, the Fed should reconsider its priorities. There does not seem to be an urgent need for real-time payment technologies, which are already being offered and developed by the private sector. The role of public entities such as the Fed is not to compete with the market, but to provide and secure a good competitive environment for the market to develop.

For all the talk of central banks issuing digital currencies, many of them are secretly hoping the private sector will come up with solutions that make this unnecessary.

"The Eurosystem therefore welcomes the strategic initiative of a number of major European banks to create a true pan-European retail payment solution that has the potential to meet the vision of our strategy. The proposed solution would be based on the SEPA credit transfer instant (SCT Inst) scheme, which is in our view the correct approach as it is future-oriented. And it could capitalise from day one on existing powerful and sophisticated infrastructures, such as the Eurosystem's TIPS."

A Fed website dedicated to the central bank's payment processing services put up a notice at 9:57 am. New York time on Thursday stating, "the FedACH Services application began experiencing disruption on December 18 at 3:30 p.m.

European Central Bank policy maker Jens Weidmann called on banks to come up with cheaper and faster systems for transferring money to combat alternatives such as Facebook Inc.'s Libra, and said there's no pressing reason yet for the ECB to develop its own digital currency.

The Eurosystem's retail payments strategy aims to foster innovative and cost-efficient payments. Providing the possibility to make easy, instant, efficient and safe payments to any counterparty, anywhere in Europe, is the cornerstone of this strategy. Within this framework, the Eurosystem has launched a powerful platform for the continuous settlement of instant payments: Target Instant Payment Settlement (Tips).1 This article explains the characteristics of this platform and its possible role in the future European payments landscape."

Maldives Monetary Authority (MMA) has signed an agreement with TietoEVRY, to implement an Instant Payments System. The project also involves developing a digital bank solution with a mobile application to enable the creation of new services, promote innovation and increase competition in the Maldives. Also it will give nonbank payment service providers access to the account-to-account domestic payments scheme using open APIs, thus enabling digital and integrated payment services. https://www.mma.gov.mv/#/news/PR-MCS-2020-7(english).html

This Banco de España paper written by the Banco Central del Uruguay's Jorge Ponce provides a rationale for central banks to have a deeper involvement in retail payment systems by building and keeping control of core components of these systems, considering competition and financial stability arguments. Central bank digital currency (CBDC) and fast payment systems (FPS) are assessed as alternative tools serving central banks to foster efficiency, resilience and security in retail payments, as well as to preserve financial stability. It concludes that, while central banks should build and keep control of the core components of either a CBDC or a FPS, private sector involvement will be optimal in a tiered architecture where payment services providers compete for customers, innovate and offer overlay services.

Through CBDC, governments could send direct payments much more rapidly than through checks or tax refunds and could provide geographically and temporally targeted relief. The CBDC supporting infrastructure would also enable fund receivers to make payments and transfers seamlessly to other CBDC holders and/or non-CBDC holders, anywhere and anytime across the economy. CBDC could reinforce the resilience of a country's retail payment services, especially in those cases where private sector infrastructures are disrupted, due to technical problems, personnel unavailability, or inability of service providers to operate. The 'programmability' of CBDC could be used to monitor and control how, when, and where recipients utilise the funds. Finally, CBDC could enable people to substitute for cash and in-person payment methods when social distancing is required, or if the use of cash plummets as people worry about germs. Still, CBDC projects will take time to materialise, and meanwhile existing infrastructures could be improved to facilitate transfers and payments.

As part of modernizing its core payments infrastructure, Canada will replace the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) with a new Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system called Lynx. An important question for policy-makers is how Lynx should be designed. This paper presents simulation results to aid in the design of Lynx. The main interest of policy-makers is to measure the liquidity demands of the system and the corresponding amount of time it takes to settle the value and volume of transactions typically observed in LVTS. To assess this, we developed a simulation environment of the Lynx system using the description of its vendor. We evaluated a variety of configurations of Lynx under several payment demand scenarios. With an initial liquidity comparable to one pledged in LVTS today, Lynx with a first in, first out (FIFO) bypass configuration would require a higher level of liquidity than LVTS or a plain-vanilla RTGS with pooled liquidity. This suggests Lynx could be made significantly more efficient, warranting further research.