China Payments

Ant Group CEO Eric Jing Says Digital Yuan Could Bring ‘Huge Synergy Effects’

Fintech giant Ant Group‘s Chairman and CEO has Eric Jing has come forward to express his support for e-CNY, China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) had begun the pilot trials of e-CNY in 2019 to support the development of retail payment infrastructures and improve payment system efficiency in parallel with digital economy developments in the country.

Eric Jing

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) quoted him saying,

“Because the biggest feature of the e-CNY is programmability, it can ensure cross-chain communication between the payment blockchain and the business blockchain in the payment chain of yuan clearing, so that one party can perform the contract and the other party can automatically deliver it. This will bring huge synergy effects to the industry.”

He added that the “e-CNY could be as valuable to the industrial internet as mobile payments were to the consumer internet” during the Inclusion Conference on the Bund last Thursday.

Mu Changchun, Head of the Digital Currency Research Institute, the central bank agency responsible for developing the digital yuan, had previously urged payment companies such as Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay to “improve their interoperability and unify QR codes for e-CNY payments”.

Alipay started supporting e-CNY payments in May 2021, and WeChat Pay did so in January 2022.