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CBDC can leverage the decentralized and secure advantages of blockchain. This enables P2P transactions, offers a more resilient payment infrastructure, reduces transaction costs, enhances information sharing capabilities and facilitates data reconciliation. Blockchain enabled payment solutions have been rigorously tested by central banks across North America, Europe and Asia.

Major global banking group HSBC has implemented tokenization technology into its receivables infrastructure for corporate clients in India.

"We expect that the evolution of payment infrastructure will accelerate. All actors are grappling with what is at stake. For governments and central banks, regulating this transformation will be a prerequisite to avoiding a possible privatization of monetary policy, and for banks and other financial services providers, keeping up with evolving customer preferences and further adjusting the pricing of payments and transfers appears unavoidable."

The ITW Global Leaders' Forum (GLF), which is a network of leaders from the world's largest wholesale carriers, announced Monday the launch of a blockchain-based platform. Known as the Communications Blockchain Network (CBN), this will revolutionize the ICT Service Provider industry's commercial settlement infrastructure, representing an opportunity worth billions to the global industry.

Through Elipay, merchants can accept Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin, Ether and ELI tokens (its native currency) via a platform that can be integrated into their existing infrastructure. Settlements occur immediately - and the company claims its technology eliminates the delays seen when credit card payments are being cleared. To address concerns over volatility, businesses that accept digital currencies can opt to receive revenue in their local currency, meaning no in-depth crypto knowledge is required.

"By visiting this Mexico City bar, I was struck by how little things have changed since I started covering the technology in 2011. Over the last eight years, the bitcoin community-and bitcoin's price-has grown by orders of magnitude. The bitcoin economy has much more sophisticated infrastructure for storing and trading bitcoins. But practical applications for bitcoin-beyond trading it, holding it, and hoping to get rich-seem almost as elusive today as they were eight years ago."

The US has several private real-time networks offered by payments providers and big banks. But the Fed says these alternatives have important limitations, like the lack of a universal infrastructure. "Most of these services rely on 'closed-loop' approaches, meaning that users signed up to one service cannot exchange payments with users signed up to other services," the Fed statement noted.

Ms. Brainard says the Fed must develop its own system because "no single private-sector provider of any U.S. payment system has ever achieved nationwide reach on its own." Perhaps that is because the Fed has undercut private systems with its regulatory and infrastructure advantage, as the Government Accountability Office reported in 2016.

FX Derivatives (FXD) participants face a tricky choice across a patchwork of clearing and uncleared optimization techniques, trading off funding and capital usage with infrastructure spend and operational risk. In earlier posts, we showed you how FX IM optimization via NDFs and FX Options clearing developed in Q1 2019.  Here I update the volumes for Q2 2019 and set the trends alongside other emerging techniques in FXD counterparty risk reduction.

The ECB's Benoît Coeuré will chair a meeting on September 16 at the BIS headquarters in Basel between Libra and the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure. The CPMI side will be represented by officials from 26 central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England.

This report reiterates and enhances the guidance developed in the report on Payment aspects of financial inclusion (PAFI) issued by the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and the World Bank Group in 2016. Since then, the PAFI framework has been adopted as the analytical underpinning for designing and implementing country-level actions and global efforts to improve access to and usage of transaction accounts.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore launched a campaign to encourage the public to use digital payment platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic. Supported by the Association of Banks, the MAS is promoting platforms PayNow, PayNow Corporate and SGQR. SGQR is a common quick response code for electronic payments. It creates a single "multi-tenanted" QR for each merchant, supported by central infrastructure.

As first envisioned in a 2018 white paper by the pseudonymous "Team Rocket," the Avalanche protocol uses random network sampling to reach consensus. But it is AVA Labs' (www.avalabs.org) ambition in building new infrastructure for the financial markets that now drives the firm forward.

Banco Central do Brasil will roll out PIX, an instant, 24/7 payments system enabled via QR codes, in November 2020. It will allow users to send and receive payments instantly via cell phone. The PIX's centralized and sole settlement infrastructure is the Instant Payment System (SPI)-to be operated and managed by BCB.

"Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) promise to provide cash-like safety and convenience for peer-to-peer payments. To do so, they must be resilient and accessible. They should also safeguard the user's privacy, while allowing for effective law enforcement. Different technical designs satisfy these attributes to varying degrees, depending on whether they feature intermediaries, a conventional or distributed infrastructure, account- or token-based access, and retail interlinkages across borders. We set out the underlying trade-offs and the related hierarchy of design choices."

The white paper, Privacy 2020: 10 Privacy Risks and 10 Privacy Enhancing Technologies to Watch in the Next Decade, identifies ten technologies that are likely to create increasingly complex data protection challenges. Over the next decade, privacy considerations will be driven by innovations in tech linked to human bodies, health, and social networks; infrastructure; and computing power. The white paper also highlights ten developments that can enhance privacy - providing cause for optimism that organizations will be able to manage data responsibly. Some of these technologies are already in general use, some will soon be widely deployed, and others are nascent.

The best way to realize the full potential of FinTech to support the SDGs is to focus on four pillars: (i) digital identity and simplified account opening and e-KYC systems, (ii) open interoperable electronic payments systems, (iii) using the infrastructure of (i) and (ii) to underpin electronic provision of government services and payments, and (iv) digital financial markets and systems to support broader access to finance and investment.

Singapore has been named the world's top nation in terms of digital adoption and which showcases the most favorable environment for digitalization, according to Cisco's annual Digital Readiness Index. The index, which measures digital readiness of countries based on seven components: ease of doing business, human capital, startup environment, technology adoption and technology infrastructure, ranked Singapore as the world's most well prepared country for digitalization.

There's a small segment of Swedish society for which digital payment technology doesn't work. That segment includes people on low incomes, who feel cash gives them greater control, enabling them to prevent their remaining money being eaten by direct debits. For people living in rural areas, often the infrastructure doesn't exist to rely on digital payments. And charities report how cash enables people who experience domestic abuse to hide money away if their abuser has taken control of their bank account.

The European Central Securities Depositories Association stated that incorporating crypto-assets into the existing financial regulatory framework could inject trust and legal certainty into the marketplace and speed up adoption. However, in cases where fitting crypto-assets into the existing financial regulatory framework would not be appropriate (e.g. stablecoins) "[i]t might be considered whether the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures would provide the right basis for its regulation."