Standard Chartered CEO Hints At Launching Its Own Digital Currency

London-based banking giant Standard Chartered is looking to launch its own digital currency as per the comments coming from CEO Bill Winters. Speaking at the Singapore FinTech Festival, Winters said that the international payments landscape is evolving rapidly.

He further noted that the widespread creation and rollout of digital currencies is “absolutely inevitable”. Interestingly, he also mentioned that there is sufficient scope for state-backed digital currencies as well as private ones. He further added that the bank is set to announce a ‘special news’ for its own digital currencies in the coming days.

“I think there is absolutely a role for central bank digital currencies as well as non-central bank-sponsored digital currencies,” he said. Bill Winters sees a huge opportunity for some niche-specific or application-specific digital currencies instead of all fiat-backed digital currencies.

“The really interesting development for me is to have currencies that don’t match a currency in and of itself but are intended to capture either a superset of a subset. Standard Chartered is set to announce further news along these lines in the coming days,” he added.

2020 has witnessed massive developments for digital currencies and the COVID-19-led economic crisis has further accelerated the process. Governments and central banking institutions worldwide have already started experimenting with it.

China has been the forerunner is the development and push-ahead for CBDCs. Even the European Central Bank is actively considering a Digital Euro but the timeline for the same remains undecided.

Although government institutions have accelerated the development of digital currencies, private players have been having a tough time dealing with the regulators. Facebook’s Libra project and cryptocurrency has faced major resistance from the SEC and other government agencies.

After massive consultations with regulators, Facebook has recently rebranded its project as Diem and would serve as a alternative currency to U.S. Dollar. Apart from the U.S, regulators in the EU have also strongly objected to the use of private stablecoins.

Interestingly, Wall Street banking giant JPMorgan has launched its own stablecoin dubbed JPM Coin for making instant cross-border settlements. However, the bank has limited its use only to international institutional clients as it processes trillions-of-dollars worth of transactions every single day.

Speaking at the FinTech Festival, Winters was joined by Piyush Gupta, chief executive officer of Singapore-based DBS Bank, and Calvin Choi, chairman and chief executive officer of AMTD Group. Both these people agreed to having a collaborative efforts between private and public players in the developments related to digital currencies.

The DBS CEO Mr. Gupta said: “You will find over the next few years that some kind of network stitched together, but with central bank digital currencies at the core, will become a reality”.