![]() The same dotted squares could now start to undermine their moat.įan Yifei, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), said at a recent forum on digital finance that it was necessary to standardise, among other things, the two-dimensional barcodes so that “merchants can support various payment tools without increasing costs.”īefore the pandemic, QR codes had spawned a 9.5 trillion yuan (US$1.4 trillion or RM6.34 trillion) industry for settling bills in China. All rights reserved.ALIPAY and WeChat Pay’s dominance of China’s retail payments was scripted over the past decade on the back of the humble quick recognition code. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. There were some people who have raised the e-CNY as a topic at this year's "two sessions", the country's largest annual political gathering in Beijing, where delegates of the National People's Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference discuss policy.įu Xiguo, president of the PBOC branch in the northeastern city of Shenyang, said in his proposal that Beijing should amend its banking law to "specify the form of digital yuan and clarify the legal basis for issuance", while Jonathan Choi Koon-shum, chairman of the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, said the city could help foster the cross-border flow of e-CNY. ![]() "To ensure managed anonymity, we need to strengthen legislation and improve top-level design," Mu Changchun, head of the PBOC's digital currency research institute, said in September.Īt a press conference last week, PBOC Governor Yi Gang discussed a number of major issues for the bank - including inflation, interest rate policies and financial sector reform - but made no mention of the e-CNY's progress. The timetable for the e-CNY's mass roll-out is yet to be confirmed by the PBOC, which has said that it must first formulate relevant administrative measures to enhance personal information protection for users. The two super apps each offer a myriad of services, from retailing and catering to medical services, that ensure convenience in their respective ecosystems to keep subscribers from looking to engage with other platforms. ![]() The central bank has already included the digital yuan into its calculations of the amount of cash circulating in the economy at the end of December, when total outstanding e-CNY reached 13.61 billion yuan (US$2 billion).Ĭhina, however, has mostly become a cashless society because of the ubiquitous use nationwide of Alipay and WeChat Pay, each of which have hundreds of millions of daily active users on the mainland. The PBOC has long asserted that the e-CNY will not compete with WeChat Pay or Alipay because it was developed to serve as a substitute for M0, the monetary term for total physical notes and coins in circulation. Getting both WeChat Pay and Alipay as express payment options on the e-CNY app shows an increased effort by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the country's central bank, to spur adoption of the sovereign digital currency amid a lethargic take-up by consumers since pilot trials were started in 2019.Ĭhina's e-CNY roll-out, two years ahead of any other global monetary authority, offers a crucial case study to India, Sweden, Japan, the United States and Britain, which are all in various stages of research or implementation of their own versions of central bank digital currencies. Alipay activated the e-CNY payment option on its platform in May 2021, while WeChat Pay followed suit in January 2022. ![]() Photo: Shutterstock>īoth Alipay and WeChat Pay have earlier committed to help promote the country's digital fiat money. Photo: Shutterstock alt=The mobile icons of China's e-CNY platform and Tencent Holdings' multipurpose WeChat super app are displayed on a smartphone screen. The mobile icons of China's e-CNY platform and Tencent Holdings' multipurpose WeChat super app are displayed on a smartphone screen.
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