The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the Banque de France (BDF) have announced their collaboration on wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The HKMA and BDF have long partnered to promote financial innovation.
Their latest effort involves the HKMA’s participation in Wave 2 of the European Central Bank (ECB)’s Eurosystem exploratory work, which explores new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement through trials and experiments.
This marks a significant milestone as a major non-Eurosystem central banking institution joins the initiative. The two institutions recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to advance their cooperation on wholesale CBDC and tokenisation.
The collaboration will focus on the interoperability between their wholesale CBDC infrastructures—BDF’s Distributed Ledger for Securities Settlement System (DL3S) and HKMA’s Project Ensemble Sandbox.
The main aim is to enhance real-time cross-border and cross-currency payments, optimize settlement efficiency, and improve the interoperability of financial market infrastructures across different jurisdictions.
Under the MoU, HKMA and BDF will strengthen their communication and collaboration efforts, setting the stage for further developments in tokenisation and new technologies.
Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of the BDF, said,
“As we have set the clear objective to improve cross-border payments, we have the opportunity brought by the Eurosystem exploratory work to collaborate with the HKMA on different use cases for payment versus payment between the tokenised form of the Hong Kong dollar and the Euro.
The HKMA’s recent announcement for the launch of Project Ensemble was very timely to initiate this cooperation.”
Howard Lee, Deputy Chief Executive of the HKMA said,
“The HKMA announced Project Ensemble early this year to explore innovative financial market infrastructure that will facilitate seamless interbank settlement of tokenised money through wholesale CBDC.
With the collaboration between BDF’s DL3S and the HKMA’s Project Ensemble Sandbox underway, we look forward to joining hands with the BDF to further explore different cross-border payment solutions and use cases, to promote financial market connectivity and push forward the development of the global tokenisation market.”
Featured image: Howard Lee (left), Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, meets Denis Beau (right), First Deputy Governor of the Banque de France, in Paris to exchange views and discuss cross-border collaboration opportunities.
