On August 14, the Ministry of Commerce issued the Notice on Printing and Distributing the Overall Plan for Comprehensively Deepening the Innovation and Development of Service Trade (hereinafter referred to as the Notice), pointing out that digital RMB should be piloted in qualified pilot areas in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and the central and western regions. The central bank formulates policy safeguard measures; First, it will be promoted by Shenzhen, Chengdu, Suzhou, xiong'an new area and other relevant departments of the future Winter Olympics, and then it will be promoted to other regions as appropriate.
In the eyes of the industry, this does not mean that the pilot area of digital RMB has been expanded, that is, the pilot area of digital RMB is still "4+1"-internal closed pilot tests are conducted in Shenzhen, Suzhou, xiong'an new area, Chengdu and the Winter Olympics. However, it is foreseeable that with the release of the Notice, the application scenario of the digital RMB pilot is expected to be extended to the field of service trade innovation and development.
In his view, because digital RMB payment has the characteristics of offline transfer and no need to bind bank cards, the expansion of application scenarios will bring new challenges to the stability of financial institutions' related digital RMB payment and settlement systems, anti-money laundering monitoring and transaction processing efficiency improvement.
"We also conduct various stress tests internally," he pointed out. For example, when the transaction volume of digital RMB in a certain scene suddenly increases beyond a certain amount, will the whole transaction processing system encounter system failures such as downtime? Therefore, the technical department has been designing new technical solutions to give priority to ensuring the stability and reliability of the system after the surge in digital RMB transaction processing.
On the morning of August 17, after the promulgation of the Notice, the technical department of other banks discussed the new application scenarios of the digital RMB pilot, including medical care, education, tourism and e-commerce services. However, most technicians believe that these C-oriented application scenarios with large transaction payment processing capacity are not ready for the large-scale popularization of digital RMB pilot. One of the important reasons is that they are still testing the operational robustness and scenario applicability of the network-free transfer function (that is, in the case of no network, only two mobile phones need to touch each other to transfer the corresponding digital currency in one person's digital wallet to another person's digital wallet account).
"At present, we will regularly report to the relevant departments of the central bank the technical achievements and operational problems encountered in the digital RMB pilot. If the relevant departments of the central bank agree that we will expand the application scenario to the innovative development of service trade in accordance with the requirements of the Notice when the technical conditions are mature and the risks are controllable, we will soon increase R&D investment and testing in this area. " The person in charge of the above IT department said.
In the future, with the gradual expansion of the pilot application scenario of digital RMB, its transaction frequency and transaction payment processing capacity will increase, which will pose new challenges to compliance operations such as anti-money laundering monitoring of financial institutions.
In his view, at present, the anti-money laundering monitoring means of the digital RMB pilot has been relatively perfect, but this is mainly because the application scenario is low and the pilot is closed. Once the application scenario is gradually liberalized, the number of users and transaction payments increase sharply. Whether banks can monitor the massive digital RMB payments and transfers in real time will undoubtedly pose a great challenge to the R&D capability of the relevant digital currency operating system and the update of anti-money laundering technology.
"At present, we are also trying to solve the problem of traceability of digital RMB capital flow and real-time monitoring of anti-money laundering through blockchain technology, but blockchain is only a technical path developed by digital RMB in many application scenarios, and there may be other new technologies that can provide more optimized compliance operation technical solutions." He said. In addition, many consumer application scenarios may not be suitable for large-scale payment of digital RMB due to long process and high financial compliance operation requirements, and the corresponding anti-money laundering monitoring technical means also need to be adjusted and optimized.
Editor Li Jianhua Intern Li Geli
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