After successful completion of CBDC pilot, Jamaica eyes national roll-out

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The ambi­tious cen­tral bank dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy (CBDC) ini­tia­tives that were under­tak­en by most coun­tries glob­al­ly over the past few years are final­ly bear­ing fruit, and devel­op­ing economies seem to be lead­ing the race. Most recent­ly, the Bank of Jamaica has announced the com­ple­tion of its CBDC pilot test­ing, with most­ly suc­cess­ful results. The dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy is expect­ed to be nation­al­ly rolled out in the first quar­ter of 2022.

All set for roll-out

After con­duct­ing pro­to­type test­ing of the CBDC in March 2021, the BOJ had com­menced an 8‑month long pilot test­ing of the cur­ren­cy in May which came to an end last week, accord­ing to a gov­ern­ment announcement.

The first stage of the test­ing com­prised the BOJ mint­ing CBDC worth 230 mil­lion Jamaican dol­lars ($1.5 mil­lion) to be dis­trib­uted to deposit-tak­ing insti­tu­tions and autho­rized pay­ment ser­vice providers in August. This was fol­lowed by 1 mil­lion JMD ($6,500) worth of dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy being dis­trib­uted to the staff at BoJ’s bank­ing department.

In late Octo­ber, the bank fur­ther issued 5 mil­lion JMD ($32,000) worth of CBDC to the Nation­al Com­mer­cial Bank (NCB), one of Jamaica’s ​​largest finan­cial insti­tu­tions. The NCB then became the pilot’s first wal­let provider, on-board­ing 4 small mer­chants, and 53 con­sumers. Along with facil­i­tat­ing per­son-to per­son, cash-in and cash-out trans­ac­tions through 37 accounts, mer­chant trans­ac­tions were also car­ried out at an NCB-spon­sored event.

The suc­cess­ful pilot is expect­ed to be fol­lowed by a nation­al roll­out of the CBDC dur­ing the first quar­ter of 2022, the rpe­ort not­ed. The BOJ is expect­ing to on-board two new wal­let providers, who have already been con­duct­ing vir­tu­al sim­u­la­tion test­ing. They will be able to order CBDC from the BOJ and dis­trib­ute the tokens to their cus­tomers. Fur­ther­more, the cen­tral bank is also work­ing towards build­ing inter­op­er­abil­i­ty between these wal­let providers so that con­sumers can car­ry out cross wal­let transactions.

While Jamaica could be ear­ly to the par­ty, it was still beat­en by Nige­ria, which rolled out its CBDC back in Octo­ber, 2021. A report pub­lished ear­li­er today not­ed that the dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy eNaira’s adop­tion had grown sig­nif­i­cant­ly since launch, and mobile down­loads of its wal­let were aver­ag­ing at 20,000 a day. More­over, with­in a month of the launch, almost 114,900 acti­vat­ed wal­lets had been detect­ed out of the total 589,000 down­loaded appli­ca­tions, which car­ried out 37,810 trans­ac­tions dur­ing this time.

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