Ant Group, which was ordered by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to restructure its operations, has been working with the country’s central bank on the nation’s sovereign digital currency since 2017, according to information disclosed over the weekend by South China Morning Post.
At the Digital China Summit, an annual trade fair in the city of Fuzhou in southeastern Fujian province, Ant Group showed off through prominent posters at the event their history of cooperation with the PBOC on the digital yuan.
This is the first time that Ant, which called off its mega initial public offering in Hong Kong and Shanghai late last year, has disclosed a detailed timeline of its work on China’s digital currency. Ant is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.
Ant was invited to join the research and development of the digital yuan in late 2017, according to its poster. It also showed that MYbank, an Ant-backed online bank, became one of the operational institutions to offer the digital yuan.
In June 2019, China’s digital currency institute began to use Ant’s mobile app development platform mPaaS (mobile platform-as-a-service) to develop its app.
Ant officially tested China’s digital yuan in July 2020. By November 2020, the fintech company had deepened cooperation with the central bank’s digital currency institute over many projects, including OceanBase database.
In December 2020, Ant launched a digital yuan trial in Shanghai, according to the company’s poster. It also showed that Ant started to roll out the digital yuan in different parts of the country for a variety of industries at the start of this year.
China was the first major economy to begin exploring its own digital currency in 2014. Although it is yet to officially launch, the technology has been tested in major Chinese including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Li Bin, head of the Macroprudential Policy Bureau of the PBOC, said earlier this month that digital yuan trials will expand to 10 Chinese cities this year.
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
