The Banque Régionale de Marchés (BRM) has announced it will start the distribution of a digital currency, the eCFA, in Senegal to later extend it in a second phase to Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Togo and Guinea-Bissau.

The eCFA, which will be issued in compliance with e-money regulations of the Central Bank of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), will be made available in partnership with eCurrency Mint Limited as a secure digital instrument that can be transacted across all existing payment platforms.

It will be equivalent in value to physical legal tender and can be held in all mobile money and e-money wallets to secure universal liquidity.

Its use will provide transparency to the entire digital ecosystem in WAEMU and enable interoperability which has always been a problem in several settings because different telcos issue mobile money services using separate systems. The difference makes it difficult for users to deal with each other across platforms.

According to GSMA, mobile money has done more to extend the reach of financial services in the last decade than traditional "bricks and mortar" banking has in the last century and Sub-Saharan Africa continues to account for the majority of live mobile money services (52%).

With more than 70% of Africa's population still not having access to basic banking services, going by World Bank's figures, a trusted electronic means of transacting such as the eCFA will serve as a good instrument of financial inclusion as the digital legal tender will offer the more than 100 million citizens of the eight countries a means to save and transact securely.

The eCFA, which will coexist with other forms of currency offering a digital form to seamlessly send, receive, store and transact digitally, can only be issued by an authorised financial institution.

The West African CFA franc is pegged to the euro which has helped the countries using it to avoid the declines seen in most emerging-market and African peers due to the slowdown in China's demand for commodities.

The introduction of the eCFA follows Tunisia which became the first nation to offer its national currency for transmittance through cryptographic technology last December.

The post office, La Poste Tunisienne, tested a crypto-powered payments app for 600,000 of its customers using Blockchain technology in partnership with startups Monetas and DigitUs.

eCurrency works with central banks to issue digital fiat currency to operate alongside notes and coins.