eCurrency Mint Limited, which partnered with Banque Régionale de Marchés late last year to provide a digital fiat currency (DFC) in the West African Economic and Monetary Union, has become a member of ITU's standardisation arm, ITU-T.
The ITU-T assembles experts from around the world to develop international standards which define elements in the global infrastructure of ICTs while affording all countries and companies, irrespective of size, equal rights to influence the development process.
eCurrency's latest move is to influence the development of the international standards to provide the technical underpinnings of DFC which is gradually becoming popular as a recognised legal tender equivalent to banknotes and coins authorised and issued by a country's central bank.
According to David Wen, co-founder and Chief Scientist of eCurrency, their solution is a product built on the three key principles identified by the Watal report by the India Ministry of Finance in December 2016 - ownership neutrality, technology neutrality, and infrastructure neutrality - and is intended to address the main challenges faced by today's digital financial services.
He states in a post: "Most recently, the first commercial deployment of DFC that involves the banking system as the issuer and mobile-wallet provider as the distributor has been successfully deployed in Senegal.
"The distinguishing feature of the eCurrency solution is that it can be considered a regulatory technology for the payment ecosystem that allows the Central Bank to issue secure hardware-protected cryptographic objects (DFC Instrument) independent of payment or ledger systems."
eCurrency was a participant in the ITU-T Focus Group on digital financial services which issued a series of policy recommendations to assist countries in leveraging digital tools to increase financial inclusion.
After Senegal, the second phase of the digital currency will see its distribution to Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Togo and Guinea-Bissau. The digital instrument can be held in all mobile money and e-money wallets, it will secure universal liquidity, enable interoperability, and provide transparency to the entire digital ecosystem in WAEMU.
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