Banque de France (BDF) and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) have announced a significant collaboration to advance wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) solutions, according to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The partnership aims to explore new cross-border payment opportunities and strengthen financial innovation.
Strengthening financial innovation
BDF and HKMA have maintained a close relationship in promoting financial innovation. The latest collaboration marks HKMA’s participation in the second round of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) exploratory work on the Eurosystem. This initiative is an important milestone as it is the first time that a central banking institution outside the Eurosystem has participated in such an effort. The two organizations recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which marks a significant step forward in their bilateral collaboration to foster innovation in the wholesale CBDC and tokenization markets.
Interoperability and Efficiency
The collaboration will focus on studying interoperability between each other’s CBDC infrastructures, BDF’s DL3S and HKMA’s Project Ensemble Sandbox. The primary goal is to improve real-time cross-border and cross-currency payments. The cross-border experiments aim to optimize settlement efficiency and promote interoperability between financial market infrastructures across jurisdictions. The initiative is expected to lay the foundation for further advancements in tokenization and new technologies.
Statement of Official
BDF First Deputy Governor Denis Beau emphasized the goal of improving cross-border payments. He highlighted the opportunities presented by the work exploring the Euro system to work with the HKMA on various use cases for tokenized Hong Kong dollars and pay-to-pay between euros. Beau said: “HKMA’s recent announcement of the launch of Project Ensemble was very timely to begin this collaboration. We look forward to further testing our DL3S platform in this context and hope that together we can drive the anticipated financial inclusion through improved cross-border payments.”
HKMA Deputy Managing Director Howard Lee pointed out the enormous potential for cooperation between France and Hong Kong, especially in the fintech sector. “The HKMA announced Project Ensemble earlier this year to explore innovative financial markets infrastructure to facilitate seamless interbank settlement of tokenized money through wholesale CBDC,” said Li. “The collaboration between BDF’s DL3S and the HKMA’s Project Ensemble Sandbox “As we move forward, we look forward to working with BDF to further explore various cross-border payment solutions and use cases, drive financial market connectivity and drive the development of the global tokenization market,” he said.
Howard Lee (left), Deputy Director of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, meets with Denis Bo (right), First Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, in Paris to exchange views and discuss cross-border cooperation opportunities.
For further details, please refer to the official website of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
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