China’s proposed digital currency will help banks bridge the gap on mobile payment

The People’s Bank of China’s (PBOC) “imminent” move to launch the country’s own sovereign digital currency underlines the central bank’s urgency to tighten its grip on the nation’s deposit pool and help banks catch up with their mobile payment business, analysts said.

The PBOC set up the project in 2014 to look into launching its own digital currency to cut costs and circulating cash, and boost policymakers’ control of money supply. Although the project has been closely guarded, various media reports suggest that the central bank’s researchers have been working intensively on the cryptocurrency’s systems for the past year.

Photo credit: wutwhan / 123RF.

Mu Changchun, deputy director of the PBOC’s payment and settlement department, gave more details about the nearly ready digital currency last week at an industry conference in Heilongjiang.  He says the PBOC would rely on Chinese commercial banks to be the conversion agency, helping to convert cash in circulation into the PBOC-backed digital currency and vice versa.

The project also signals PBOC’s urgency in launching its own digital currency after Facebook announced details about its Libra cryptocurrency project in mid-June. Global central banks, including the PBOC, have reiterated that Libra must be put under central bank oversight to prevent potential foreign exchange risks and protect the authority of monetary policy.

Mu said that the digital currency “may not necessarily be dependent on blockchain” and will be used only to support small value retail transactions.

Analysts said this could also rein in the dominance of the country’s two third-party payment operators like Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay, which together account for 90% of mobile payment transactions in China, as retail depositors would switch some of their payment transactions to the PBOC-issued digital cash.

Ant Financial is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.

Cindy Wang, an analyst at DBS Group Research, said that by involving banks as the fiat-to-digital currency conversion agent, the PBOC wants to make sure that when the digital currencies are converted back into renminbi, the money can flow back into banks’ deposit accounts.

“Currently, banks are under pressure to retain their deposit base because, with the money market funds distributed by third-party payment providers like Alipay or Tencent, some of the idle money held in mobile payment accounts are leaked out of the banking system into the hands of fund managers,” said Wang.

Alipay operates a money market fund distribution platform which hosts the world’s largest money market fund called Yu’e Bao, with total assets of 1.03 trillion yuan (US$146 billion) as of June.

By designating banks as the agent to convert between the PBOC digital currency and fiat money, then banks could use their own internet banking services to retain cash held by individuals and merchants and ultimately turn them into banks’ deposits.

“With banks’ loan-to-deposit ratio rising, if banks continue to lose their deposit base it will be difficult for them to keep up with their lending. So through the digital currency, the PBOC hopes to divert some of the deposits back to the banking system,” said Wang.

According to the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory mission, Chinese banks’ loan-to-deposit ratio in the second quarter stood at 72.8%, up from 69.1% a year ago.