By Shelly Melancon (Switzerland)
Singapore’s top financial regulator (the MAS) has listed 16 financial institutions participating in its national digital currency payment system challenge. These finalists were chosen from the more than 300 participants spread across 49 countries.
Participants Proposed Impressive Statement Problem Solutions
Later in the year, the chosen participants must develop and present their solutions during the country’s FinTech conference. Its purpose is to enhance the adoption of FinTech’s solutions for retail national digital currencies. Thus, small merchants can easily access CBDC solutions related to infrastructure and distribution.
One of the shortlisted participants is a Consensys-Visa partnership that will develop a Consensys-supported visa payment solution for retail national digital currencies. Consensys will provide blockchain support, while Visa will provide the payment module. Another shortlisted participant is the partnership between xfer and SEBA bank.
Their solution is protection for individual and personal data and a tracker to ensure that all transactions on the network are legit. Singapore’s MAS further disclosed that this challenge aims to provide credible retail solutions for national digital currencies worldwide.
MAS’ head of FinTech said his team was impressed by the quality of contributions and pedigree of the participants in the challenge. Each participant proposed deep and diverse insights into various problem statements. Aside from the CBDC challenge, Singapore’s apex bank agrees with the BIS innovation hub to create an international payment solution that links various national digital currencies.
Also read:Nigeria’s Apex Issues National Digital Currency Draft Policies
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s apex bank has released guidelines for its e-naira CBDC. Part of the guidelines included the e-naira’s features and its relationship to fiat naira. The CBN established that both currencies would be pegged at equal value, but the e-naira will not bear any interest.
The e-naira will also function similarly to the fiat naira. But its transaction limits will be different. Also, there will be different anti-money laundering and know your customer policies based on each individual’s banking exposure. For instance, unbanked persons can’t make more than 50,000-naira worth of transactions daily and must have verified their details using their national identity-linked details.
However, the transaction limits for those with more banking exposure will be significantly higher. There will be mandatory physical verification for anyone willing to complete more than one million naira’s worth of transactions. Also, those in the merchant category won’t have any cap on their daily transaction amount.
The apex bank further stated that there would be no charges for transactions performed with e-naira wallets. Hence, it is likely that the e-naira will be massively embraced by the populace as they have been groaning about banks’ transaction charges for a long time now.
Nigeria’s CBDC design feature will incorporate the apex bank’s forex control guidelines to ease global money transfers. The CBN has three proposals for international money operators to be involved in e-naira operations. As widely reported, Nigeria’s central bank proposed a CBDC two months ago with the plan to launch it in the last quarter of this year.
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