With a greater number of countries making progress in the development and implementation of their respective central bank digital currencies (CBDC), the central bank of Ghana intends to keep up.
According to the Bank of Ghana’s head of fintech and innovation, Kwame Oppong, they are completing their research on central bank digital currencies because they want to ensure financial inclusion.
CBDCs
Oppong also shed some light on the reasons why the West African country has decided to explore the ideal of central bank digital currencies.
The government official stated that their primary goal, for now, is to complete testing and then eventually allow their citizens a chance to use a decent method of payment.
He said that they had already seen the results and they are going to continue looking and studying the concept in the future as well.
But, he asserted that the primary reason they had decided to focus on it was because they want to make financial inclusion possible.
Ghana’s CBDC has been named ‘E-Cedi’ and they have already been conducting offline pilots at a town known as Sefwi Asafo.
Those who participated in these were able to use the CBDC for buying products and services from merchants in different places, even without an internet connection.
The benefits
According to Oppong, another prominent benefit that a CBDC offered is the data that the participants generated.
The fintech executive elaborated that this data could come in handy for determining someone’s eligibility for loans if it is shared with the banks.
In fact, he also went on to highlight the cost savings that could also be seen with the implementation of a CBDC in the country.
He said that since CBDCs are able to offer the feature of international settlement, there is a good chance that they can help in reducing costs.
Undecided
However, even though the central bank official talked about the potential benefits that a CBDC can offer, he also stated that the different global entities were still trying to weigh its pros and cons.
He stated that society was still undecided on whether a CBDC is useful or not and it needs to figure that out before things can move forward.
Oppong also had a discussion about stablecoins and said that they could play a key role in finance when it comes to making cross-border transactions.
Other than this, the high ranking executive stated that one of the best things about crypto is that it can offer a simple user experience that is hard to match.
He indicated that a number of entities all over the world were already recognizing the importance of blockchain and how it could be implemented for different purposes.
While there are proponents of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), there are also people who do not think that they are any good.
Based in the US, a think tank called the Bitcoin Policy Institute recently presented the argument that stablecoins and Bitcoin (BTC) are better than CBDCs.
