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The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) issued a Request for Vendor Information (RFVI) seeking input from vendors to shape the discovery process for the commercial deployment of its DCash retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) technology solution. In particular, the ECCB is seeking input from vendors that have "developed a retail CBDC solution or core components of such a solution which is deployment-ready". Upon evaluation of responses vendors may be invited to further participate in a subsequent request for proposals (RFP) exercise. The ECCB, working with technology partner Bitt, has been piloting the DCash across its eight-member island countries since 2021, so this announcement comes as a surprise.

Cyber risk rating firms are helping companies keep track of the cyber resilience of their vendors. Firms such as SecurityScorecard and RiskRecon offer a cyber score based on information scraped from the internet. These services can be integrated into firms' vendor vetting processes to continuously monitor third and fourth parties, bypassing costly site visits and questionnaires.

The National Bank of Georgia (NBG) will launch a "limited access live pilot environment" (sounds like a proof-of-concept phase to me) to test central bank digital currency (CBDC) system technology capabilities and potential applications. At this stage, the NBG remains technologically agnostic for the Digital GEL project, and has announced a list of nine platform vendors to join the "on field" exploration. Upon selection stage completion, NBG will identify one of the vendors to move to the pilot stage to test the CBDC platform in a limited-time run live environment and evaluate the practical use cases. (There were some surprises to me in the list of vendors!)

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a paper that analyzes the effect of big tech platforms on credit markets. It finds that: "(i) platform lending serves as an instrument to price discriminate vendors with heterogenous funding needs, resulting in higher fees and below-market interest rates; (ii) platform lending can spur innovation by providing access to subsidized credit, but may be detrimental to vendors who do not borrow; and (iii) when the platform has better information it will lend only to the highest-quality vendors and at a better rate than banks, which, anticipating adverse selection effects, will not lend. The results suggest that platform lending can be socially desirable if the users would not have received funding from banks, but it has ambiguous effects otherwise."

The western Beijing district of Shijingshan said on Tuesday that more 200 vendors at and around the venues for the 2022 games were now supporting payments made using e-CNY.

"Most credit card companies don't impose swipe fees on consumers, charging vendors instead. But shoppers end up bearing those costs, as vendors hike prices to cover the fees. The National Retail Federation (NRF), the country's largest retail association, estimates credit cards cost the average American family $700 a year, an amount that will only grow with the new fees."

"Juniper Research's new CBDCs & Stablecoins research provides in-depth analysis and evaluation of how these new payment system risk types are being developed and commercialised within financial markets; delivering critical insights on how they will change business models in payments, key vendors driving the evolution of the market and the future prospects for these payment types of digital assets. It provides an evaluation of the development of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) and stablecoins across 19 different key countries of interest. The study also contains the Juniper Research Competitor Leaderboard; positioning 15 key CBDCs platform vendors."

"Yesterday the European Central Bank issued five calls for vendor applications for services relating to digital euro components. A key takeaway is the framework budget is €1.1 billion ($1.2bn) for these five components. That does not include the core central bank digital currency (CBDC) settlement system which will be 'sourced internally'. "

Despite bitcoin's downsides as a medium of exchange, a group of people that would choose bitcoin over fiat would be vendors that sell legal goods that are nevertheless cut off by mainstream payments networks. For example, MasterCard's Business Risk Assessment and Monitoring (BRAM) policy cuts out synthetic drugs, salvia divinorum, psilocybin mushrooms and spores, and nitrite inhalants.

This NY Fed blog post discusses the implications of introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that offers consumers a low-cost, privacy-preserving electronic means of payment-essentially, digital cash. Central banks are better positioned, relative to private intermediaries, to commit to safeguarding data from outside vendors, because a central bank has no profit motive to exploit payments data. By helping consumers to monetize privacy, central banks would not be proposing a radical transformation to the payments landscape. Rather, they would be preserving aspects of payments that existed prior to the digital revolution. However, this would require regulators and lawmakers to rethink how to adapt current anti-money laundering practices.

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.

The Reserve Bank of Australia has reportedly gone to market for help with standing up a "data bunker", which it said forms part of its ongoing efforts to improve the resilience of the country's payment system. The successful vendor, as the systems integrator, will be charged with planning and designing the bunker; building and implementing it, along with supporting components; and running the bunker, including developing operational procedures, policies, and tools for the first year of its operation.

Stripe, which processes payments for millions of online businesses and e-commerce platforms, is teaming up with banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to offer checking accounts and other business-banking services. It will soon give its customers the option of offering insured, interest-bearing bank accounts, debit cards and other cash-management services. These products aren't meant for consumers. Rather, they are designed for the merchants and vendors that do business with Stripe's customers.

Nepal's central bank has given approval to Nepal Clearing House to operate the national payment switch. The payment gateway will integrate multiple banks, digital payment vendors into one system enabling them to transfer funds. In the first phase, all non-card transactions that are done through mobile banking, e-banking, e-wallet or QR code will be routed through the switch. In the third phase, all domestic electronic transactions will be routed through the switch.

"As more and more crypto exchanges have announced plans to stop registering mainland Chinese users and phase out existing users there, many investors on the mainland are reportedly making efforts to register companies overseas to bypass the know-your-customer (KYC) checks, which could allow them to trade crypto as corporations. Many vendors on Taobao, China's major e-commerce marketplace owned by Alibaba, are taking the chance to provide intermediary services for those mainland investors."

CLabs, the organization behind the Celo ecosystem will be working with central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform vendor eCurrency. Through the partnership, central banks that are trialing or launching CBDCs will be able to use the Celo blockchain to allow end users access to decentralized finance (DeFi) products.

The Bank of Lithuania is inviting payment market participants and technology vendors to develop a QR code-based payment solution that enables instant settlements in digital euro at points of sale. The solution should be based on an app running on mobile devices, but connectivity based on short-range wireless technologies (e.g., NFC or Bluetooth) so transactions can be done offline.

Within 20 days of announcing the acquisition of Fortress Trust to allegedly expand its pool of licenses in the United States, Ripple is pulling out of the deal, although Ripple will remain a shareholder in Fortress Trust's parent company. According to Fortress management the pullout had nothing to do with a security incident involving a third-party analytics vendor that lost the firm between $12 million and $15 million which Ripple jumped in to cover.

"Relative to other crypto-exchanges, transparency and regulatory compliance were virtues for Bankman-Fried's FTX. Here's a glimpse of the exchange's operations, according to data provided by its own general counsel, as of August 2022."

The Bank of Canada published a paper that proposes a common framework to analyze and compare the different possible retail CBDC designs, independent of vendor, platform and technology. It is based on five archetypes-common patterns that recur in system designs-and discuss their trade-offs from the perspective of privacy, compliance, visibility, scalability, resilience, extensibility, online and offline payments. The five archetypes are centralized, leaderless, macro-partitioned (money service businesses (MSBs) own and operate partitions), micro-partitioned (users maintain the different partitions) and direct (users directly provide their own oversight). The analysis suggests that a design based on a single archetype is unlikely to achieve all policy goals.