In China, the world’s largest mobile payment market,
the value of transactions reached 347 trillion RMB (US$53.04 trillion) in 2019 — almost four times the country’s GDP. The total value of transactions skyrocketed in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Meanwhile, since starting the project in 2014, the People’s Bank of China has moved rapidly towards
launching the world’s first major sovereign digital currency — the digital yuan. This should be an easy sell to consumers used to instant digital cash, enabling the government to fine-tune domestic monetary policy by directly controlling the amount of non-cash funds available to the economy. There are already real-world digital yuan operations in major cities, including Shenzhen, Chengdu and Suzhou, where customers obtain digital yuan via banks.
But the rest of Asia is lagging.
Asian countries need to embrace digital payment technologies or they risk being left in the monetary dark ages
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