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Banca D'Italia published a paper on financial technology providers and their crucial role in enabling firms - even small ones - to become more efficient and keep pace with innovation. It draws attention to how interdependencies between such providers and financial entities may pose new systemic risks, deserving the attention of financial regulators and overseers. Although it doesn't cover central bank digital currency (CBDC) explicitly, all of the points it makes seem relevant to the role such technology providers play in CBDC launches and pilots.

By harnessing the latest technologies, ZhongAn Online continues to integrate technology into every process in the insurance sector so as to reshape the entire insurance value chain.

Supervisory technology (SupTech) is the use of technology by supervisors to deliver innovative and efficient supervisory solutions that will support a more effective, flexible and responsive supervisory system. This note aims to define such a strategy and covers both prudential and conduct of business supervision, policy and interaction with entities, for insurance and occupational pensions sectors.

Deutsche Börse, Deutsche Bundesbank and Germany's Finance Agency successfully tested a settlement interface for electronic securities, working with a range of other market participants. Securities settlement using distributed ledger technology (DLT) is performed with the aid of a "trigger" solution and a transaction coordinator in TARGET2, the Eurosystem's large-value payment system. In doing so, the participants have demonstrated that it is possible to establish a technological bridge between blockchain technology and conventional payment systems to settle securities in central bank money with no need to create central bank digital currency.

The Bank of England and the U.K. Treasury announced the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Taskforce that will (i) coordinate exploration of CBDC objectives, use cases, opportunities and risks, (ii) guide evaluation of the design features, and (iii) support a rigorous, coherent and comprehensive assessment of the overall use case. Also, the Bank of England established a CBDC Unit, and created a CBDC Engagement Forum to engage senior stakeholders and gather strategic input on all non-technology aspects of CBDC, and a CBDC Technology Forum to gather input on all technology aspects of CBDC.

The National Bank of Georgia (NBG) is considering launching a digital version of its national currency, the Lari (Gel). The NBG will use its Open Regulatory Framework tools, to facilitate the retail central bank digtital currency (CBDC) development process. Rapid live testing in a controlled environment should enable the agile development of CBDC technology and an impetus to develop underlying technology to full potential, enhancing risk management and user experience. Interaction with the RegLab should also help NBG to develop its regulatory approach and update legal framework to enable smooth and sustainable CBDC technology operation.

A report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has found that while distributed ledger technology (DLT) offers the potential for significant market-wide transformation, market participants are still far from adopting this technology at scale at a market-wide level.

EY today announced the release of the third-generation zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) blockchain technology to the public domain on the Ethereum public blockchain. The enhancements of the ZKP blockchain technology will help make private transactions on public blockchains more scalable by significantly reducing transaction costs through batching multiple private transfers together in a single transaction.

Several finance-related blockchain projects are progressing nicely, and trading technology firms are releasing products for professional traders aimed at the institutional crypto investment market. But blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies are far from crossing the chasm.

Vanguard, in partnership with technology provider Symbiont, announced today the completion of the first phase of a blockchain pilot designed to digitize the issuance of asset-backed securities (ABS). In close collaboration with a large US ABS issuer, as well as BNY Mellon, Citi, and State Street, Vanguard successfully modeled the full lifecycle of an ABS settlement on distributed ledger technology (DLT) network by replicating end-to-end transaction flows.

Wise words from the BoE's Simon Scorer: "We're clear that any choice of technology around a CBDC should be led by a set of requirements and not the other way around... We would not let the choice of technology dictate the design; instead, what we would do is decide what functionality the CBDC requires, what our design principles are, and then we would choose what technology is most appropriate."

Apple has acquired Mobeewave, a startup with technology that could transform iPhones into mobile payment terminals. Mobeewave's technology lets shoppers tap their credit card or smartphone on another phone to process a payment. The system works with an app and doesn't require hardware beyond a Near Field Communications, or NFC, chip, which iPhones have included since 2014. Samsung Electronics Co. partnered with Mobeewave last year to allow its phones to use the technology.

The Bank of Lithuania has finished the research phase of its blockchain-related project, LBChain. In the next phase, it will create a sandbox that mixes technological and regulatory infrastructure for the technology. Among the projects mentioned, LBChain included a solution for blockchain-based regulatory reporting, a blockchain platform for green bond issuance, and a blockchain-based digital bank. https://www.lb.lt/en/news/lbchain-the-cradle-of-future-technologies-unrestricted-by-geographical-or-sectoral-boundaries

The Bank of Thailand reportedly launched the world's first blockchain-based government savings bond issuance platform using IBM's blockchain technology. Within two weeks of the launch, the central bank sold more than $1.6 billion worth of savings bonds. The use of blockchain technology is said to have reduced the bond issuance time from 15 days to just two days. The increased efficiency of the process has also reduced operational cost and redundant validation of documents involved in bond issuance. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bank-of-thailand-launches-worlds-first-government-savings-bond-on-ibm-blockchain-technology-301145253.html

Estonia's central bank, Eesti Pank, has launched a multi-year project with Guardtime and The SW7 Group to research how technologically suitable the Estonian e-government core technology is for operating a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The aim of the two-year multi-phase project is to investigate how suitable a solution based on the KSI Blockchain, a core technology of e-government in Estonia, could be for operating central bank digital money infrastructure. It will also examine new payment solutions that could be made possible by using electronic identity and other Estonian e-government solutions.

ISDA has published the sixth in a series of legal guidelines for smart derivatives contracts. These guidelines provide high level background on the CDS market; identify opportunities for the potential application of smart contract technology to CDS; and highlight important issues for technology developers to consider when designing technology-enabled solutions for trading and processing CDS and associated processes. These guidelines also highlight areas where further industry collaboration will be required to identify existing areas of legal and regulatory uncertainty and to develop solutions.

The Bank of England published the minutes of its first central bank digital currency (CBDC) Technology Forum meeting held on September 28, 2021. The Forum consists of senior stakeholders from industry, civil society and academia to gather strategic input on policy considerations and functional requirements pertaining to the practical challenges of designing, implementing and operating a CBDC. The meeting featured a discussion around alternative "platform" models for CBDC provision. In one model, the Bank would hold a record of every payment amount, and in another, it might just record the gross transactions with payment service providers (PSPs) in a 'pooled model'. And they discussed a variant of the pooled model to allow delayed net settlement by the PSPs, even though customer payments would be real-time. Some meeting attendees suggested an alternative anonymous cash-like model without either the PSPs or the Bank keeping a ledger. However, other Members queried the feasibility of this approach, both in terms of the viability of the technology, and in relation to resilience, and prevention of tampering and "double spending" of CBDC units.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) revealed, in its submission to the Australian Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology, that it has been conducting research on wholesale CBDC, in its in-house Innovation Lab. This included the development in 2019 of a limited proof-of-concept of a distributed ledger technology (DLT) based interbank payment system using a tokenized form of CBDC backed by exchange settlement account (ESA) balances held at the RBA. Currently, the RBA is close to finalising a project with a number of external parties that extends the earlier proof-of-concept in a number of ways, including to incorporate tokenized financial assets. The project explores the implications of delivery-versus-payment (DVP) settlement on a DLT platform as well as other programmability features of tokenized CBDC and financial assets.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) will be working with five regulatory technology (regtech) entities for the Business Research and Innovation Initiative (BRII) Regulatory Technology (Regtech) Round. ASIC's challenge in this latest round is to explore the potential of using technology to help identify and assess poor market disclosure by listed companies.

"There has been a widespread assumption that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) would be built on blockchain - or at least the distributed-ledger technology (DLT) it's based on. However, a growing number of central bankers and CBDC designers are casting doubt on the need for the technology built for Bitcoin, noting that existing technologies may serve just as well and that blockchain does bring some weaknesses to the table."