Hong Kong Monetary Authority Plans to Push Implementation of Retail e-HKD Ahead

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) released a report on e-HKD today, which shows that the HKMA will start to lay the foundation to implement retail e-HKD.

The HKMA began to explore CBDC (central bank digital currency) in 2017, and announced Project e-HKD in June 2021. In October 2021 and April 2022, the HKMA released a technical whitepaper and a policy discussion paper for e-HKD respectively, and invited stakeholders and the public for feedback. The HKMA said the feedback indicated that the respondents are supportive of the e-HKD initiative.

The report said that it's "necessary to at least start paving the way for possible future implementation" of e-HKD, and "the HKMA will therefore start work to lay the foundations for, and conduct in-depth studies and pilots on, the implementation and application of" the CBDC. In addition, "while it appears that e-HKD might not have an imminent role to play in the current retail payment market, we believe prospective use cases for e-HKD can emerge quickly out of the rapid evolution, or even revolution, in the digital economy." The report added.