On 20 April, the Division of Business and Management (DBM) arranged a guest lecture given by Dr. Oriol Caudevilla. The lecture was titled, “China´s Digital Yuan: Analysis and Opportunities for the Greater Bay Area ".

Dr. Wu Minyu, FIN Program Director, giving a welcome speech

Dr. Oriol works as Co-Leader of the Financial Inclusion and CBDCs Working Groups at the Global Impact FinTech (GIFT) Forum, Strategic Advisor at a Hong Kong-based WealthTech company, ETFCool. He is a Fellow at the Digital Euro Association (D€A) and at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS). Dr. Oriol is a member of the FinTech Association of Hong Kong and the Singapore Fintech Association (SFA).

Dr. Oriol began to talk about a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a new form of central bank money accessible to the public, accepted as a means of payment, legal tender, safe store of value by all citizens, businesses, and government agencies. Undoubtedly, the pandemic has turbocharged a global financial technology revolution. Central bank digital currencies have been referred to as “the future of payments”, or even “the future of money”, and not without reason. The CBDCs are not cryptocurrencies, even though there is of course some relation between both categories.

Dr. Oriol explained that after several years of work (the research commenced in 2014), the Chinese Government announced the starting of the tests of the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), DCEP (Digital Currency Electronic Payment) or Digital Yuan. The tests in the Mainland have proved to be very successful, to the point that the People's Bank of China (PBOC) launched the Digital Yuan wallet apps for Android and iOS in early January, 2022, and on the day of the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, there were reportedly more transactions made in China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) than through Visa.

Even though, according to a report published by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in early 2020, 80% of Central Banks in the world are currently working on CBDCs (some are just at an initial research stage, though), Asia seems to be the place where CBDCs arouse more interest. In this sense, the major economy leading the CBDC race in Asia (and in the whole world) is China. Dr. Oriol also analyzed what opportunities the Digital Yuan will offer to Mainland China, but also to Macau and to the rest of the Greater Bay Area.

The audience was incredibly captivated by Dr. Oriol’s presentation. Quite a few questions were raised by the audience in the Q&A session, including the definition of CBDC, how the CBDC is related to foreign exchange, risk control issues of CBDC as well as the opportunities of the Great Bay Area and Belt Road countries.

Dr. Anthony Liu, ACCT Program Director, raising questions