The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is this week launching a pilot scheme in four Indian cities to test the retail version of its prototype central bank digital currency (CBDC) for both in-store and peer-to-peer transactions, the central bank says... More
NFCW will be bringing together senior executives and technical specialists from across the contactless payments ecosystem on 24-26 January for the Contactless Payments Summit, part of our Contactless World Congress series of online events... More
Some 30 banks and payment services providers in Spain, including BBVA, Banco Sabadell, Banco Santander, ING, Deutsche Bank and Iberpay, have set up a working group to test the use of a digital euro for contactless in-store payments as well as ecommerce transactions and peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers... More
The Bank of Korea (BOK) is to review additional central bank digital currency (CBDC) design options after its 10-month experiment to test a retail CBDC based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) revealed “limitations of scalability” such as slow processing times during periods of high transaction volume when compared with a more conventional centralised ledger database, the bank says... More
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has begun testing a prototype wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) and will launch a pilot programme for a retail digital rupee with merchants and consumers in select locations “within a month”, the central bank says... More
Turkey is planning to launch a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that will be integrated with the country’s digital identity system and the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey’s FAST instant payments service... More
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has unveiled a prototype two-tier central bank digital currency (CBDC) ecosystem that will enable end users to store digital HK dollars as either intermediated CBDC tokens or CBDC-backed stablecoins in a digital wallet and use them to carry out retail transactions... More
Japan-based payments network JCB is to run an in-store central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot that uses existing contactless payment cards, point of sale (POS) hardware and softPOS payment acceptance technology installed on mobile devices... More
The digital yuan has been used to make 360m transactions worth a total of more than 100bn yuan (US$14bn) since China began piloting the central bank digital currency (CBDC) in December 2019, up from total cumulative transaction values worth 87.6bn yuan (US$12bn) at the end of 2021, according to the People’s Bank of China (PBOC)... More
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is to build a prototype digital rupee and test it in a range of scenarios and use cases as part of its “phased implementation strategy” for introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC)... More
The European Commission is planning to propose the legislation required for the introduction of the digital euro as a central bank digital currency issued by the European Central Bank (ECB) in 2023, EU commissioner Mairead McGuinness has confirmed... More
The European Central Bank (ECB) is to trial five prototype digital euro payment solutions to test how front-end user interfaces and back-end infrastructure can be integrated to enable users to make peer-to-peer, point-of-sale and ecommerce payments with the proposed central bank digital currency... More
Chinese consumers in the 23 cities and regions piloting the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) can now automatically transfer funds to their digital yuan wallet app whenever their balance runs low, removing the need to manually top up the balance in their e-yuan app... More
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is to enable consumers without smartphones to make transactions with the country’s eNaira central bank digital currency (CBDC) on devices such as feature phones using unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) codes that work in a similar way to SMS messages... More
Nearly one in five Chinese consumers have downloaded the country’s official digital yuan wallet app (19%), with the majority of them mainly using the central bank digital currency (CBDC) for ecommerce purchases (72%) and payments for public services such as transportation (67%), a survey by US research firm Morning Consult has found... More
Do you have expertise in contactless cards, NFC, UWB, biometrics, BLE, RFID, tokenization, digital wallets or wearables that you’d like to share with NFCW’s 12,500 members around the world... More
Students attending Hainan Lu Xun Middle School in the Chinese city of Sanya are the first in the country to trial a digital yuan hard wallet device that enables them to make payments to designated merchants on and off the school’s campus using China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) as well as verify their identity using NFC... More
Consumers in the Bahamas can now authorise in-store payments using the country’s Sand Dollar central bank digital currency (CBDC) from a SunCash mobile wallet with their face... More
Providing a cash-like digital means of payment, increasing private digital payment services, supporting financial inclusion and achieving greater payment system efficiency are among the key motivations driving initiatives to develop central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in emerging market economies around the world, according to a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) report... More
Sweden’s central bank The Riksbank has completed the second phase of its e-krona central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot and demonstrated that the blockchain-based technical solution it is testing can be integrated into existing banking and payments infrastructure... More