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The US House Financial Services Committee will be holding a hearing to discuss the use of digital tools to improve the delivery of stimulus payments on June 11 starting at noon (ET). Congressman Stephen Lynch (D-MA), who serves as Chair of the FinTech Task Force, will oversee. It will focus on recently proposed legislation calling for a FedAccount digital dollar wallet - an account maintained by a Federal Reserve Bank on behalf of any person. https://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=406612

Kabbage said it had processed more than $3.5bn in Paycheck Protection Program loans, six weeks after shutting its lending operation in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. The turnround follows a lobbying push by Kabbage and other fintech lenders for approval to help disburse $660bn of government funding earmarked for US small businesses.

This paper discusses the pros of adopting government-issued digital currencies as well as a supranational digital iCurrency. One such pro is to get rid of paper money (and coinage), a ubiquitous medium for spreading germs, as highlighted by the recent coronavirus outbreak. It sets forth three policy recommendations for adapting mobile devices as new digital wallets, regulatory oversight of sovereign digital currencies and user data protection, and a supranational digital iCurrency for facilitating international digital monetary linkages.

The government of Bermuda has commenced a pilot of a digital stimulus token in partnership with local private payments platform Stablehouse, which is expected to provide initial feedback on the viability of digital tokens in facilitating the purchase of essential products and services. In 2019, Bermuda began developing a blockchain-based digital ID system and announced that the public could pay their taxes with USDC stablecoins. The development of the stimulus token kicked off later in the year as part of the government's larger initiative to create a comprehensive crypto ecosystem on the island that supports the adoption of digital currencies. The pilot token is based on Blockstream's Liquid blockchain protocol while the Greenwallet app will enable payments via a point-of-sale terminal provided by Stablehouse.

Just six months after reaching a one million user milestone, the U.K. Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) has reported a further doubling of that U.K. user-base to 2 million. Despite the huge disruption caused by Covid-19, open banking and the fintech ecosystem have been significantly boosted by the period of lockdown. According to an OBIE survey of 2,000 UK adults, one-in-five started using online banking apps during lockdown to the first time with over half (54 per cent) now using them regularly.

Paper cheques may be on the verge of extinction in South Africa, as banks begin moves to phase them out in favour of cards and digital payment mechanisms. Major banks Nedbank, FNB and Absa have already announced plans to discontinue the use of cheque payments beginning in January. The Payments Association of South Africa says that it anticipates that even more banks will be issuing similar public announcements in the next few months. The decline in cheque usage is being exacerbated by the coronavirus outbreak.

The Bank for International Settlements Financial Stability Institute published a paper that takes stock of 71 suptech tools used for prudential supervision in 20 jurisdictions and explores the benefits, risks and implementation challenges. It found that more than half of the tools assess mainly qualitative data, underscoring the importance of analyzing textual information in prudential supervision. The remaining tools are split between those that analyze mainly quantitative data and others that scrutinize both quantitative and qualitative data. Despite these variations, all tools aim to extract deeper supervisory insights or to improve supervisory efficiency.