2024-03-26T07:33:51+00:00
A-
A
A+
/ The Society for Global Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) is working to create a new platform within the next year or two, to link the digital currencies that central banks are issuing to the current financial system.
This will be one of the most important steps yet for the emerging central bank digital currency ecosystem, given SWIFT’s key role in global banking.
About 90 percent of the world’s central banks are now considering issuing digital versions of their currencies.
Most of them do not want to lag behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but they face technological difficulties.
Nick Kerrigan, head of innovation at SWIFT, said its latest trial, which lasted six months and involved a 38-member group of central banks, commercial banks and settlement platforms, was one of the largest global collaborations in the field of central bank digital currencies and “tokenized” assets to date. .
Reduce payment risks
SWIFT focused on ensuring that different countries’ central bank digital currencies can be used together, even if they are built on different underlying technologies or “protocols,” thus reducing the risk of fragmentation of the payment system.
Experience has also shown that it can be used in very complex trade or foreign exchange payments, potentially as a mechanism to speed up and reduce operations costs.
“We’re looking at a roadmap (to launch as a product) in the next 12 to 24 months,” Kerrigan said in an interview. “It’s moving out of the beta phase toward something that becomes a reality.”
The platform launch time frame could still change if the launch of major economies’ central bank digital currencies is delayed.
Countries such as the Bahamas, Nigeria and Jamaica already have central bank digital currencies in operation.
China has come a long way in realistic experiments with the electronic yuan, and the European Central Bank also has a digital euro, while the Bank for International Settlements is conducting multiple cross-border experiments.
The main advantage of SWIFT is that its existing network is already usable in more than 200 countries and connects more than 11,500 banks and funds that use it to send trillions of dollars daily.