Last week, the City of London’s Whitechapel Think Tank unveiled a 74-page report digging into how the UK should go about launching its central bank digital currency (CBDC).
One of the core contributors behind this report is former Oracle executive Anthony Welfare, who has been heading up commercial operations at NEM Software since August.
“We should be further along than we are, but we’re not,” Welfare tells FinTech Futures. He puts this down to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the latter hitting China – home to the most advanced CBDC – just as hard.
He also highlights the “scale and complexity” of the UK payments landscape, which makes it harder to move fast compared to other countries.
But as the Whitechapel Think Tank report highlights, “the country or countries that are earliest in issuing well-designed CBDCs will likely experience rapid uptake of those CBDCs both domestically and internationally”.
“We’ve been doing research,” says Welfare, “but we do need to move forward quickly”.
“What we will be able to do is learn from what everyone else has done so,” he adds, pointing to the likes of Lithuania, the Caribbean, and Marshall Islands.
Read more: https://www.fintechfutures.com/2020/12/uk-cbdc-researcher-we-should-be-further-along-than-we-are/
