Bank of England unveils research team lineup for CBDC Forums
The United Kingdom’s central bank is beefing up its research activities towards central bank digital currency (CBDC) by selecting a list of banking and fintech experts to work on it.
The Bank of England had announced on September 29 the membership of its CBDC Engagement and Technology Forums, and that it included some big names like Google, Consensys, Spotify and Mastercard.
The current announcement is a signal towards the central bank of Nez Zealand taking the CBDC plan seriously. It further stated that the Technology Forum is drawing resources from leading analysts and experts in the domain of digital payments and cryptocurrencies.
The Engagement Forum has also included “senior stakeholders” from “civil society and academia” besides those from the industry. The Forum would assist the bank in undertaking the technological challenges of “designing, operating and implementing a CBDC.”
One of the technology experts includes Chief Technology Officer for PayPal’s blockchain and cryptocurrency, Edwin Aoki. Will Drewry, the Principal Software Engineer at Google, has also joined him along with ConsenSys’s CBDC Payments Manager Matthieu Saint Olive.
The Technology Forum has also roped in executives from Mastercard, Amazon Web Services, Stripe, Visa, IMB, R3 and Spotify. From the banking industries, are HSBC’s co-CEO of Global Banking and Markets – Georges Elhedery, Morgan Stanley’s COO Arun Kohli, and Chief Product Officer at interbank communication standard SWIFT – Stephen Gilderdale.
The Bank of England disclosed it had begun tentative research about CBDCs in November 2020. Late in April 2021, the central bank had posted a list of vacancies in the CBDC research and development.
However, Bank of England’s Governor Andrew Bailey had warned about the risks of crypto trading in May 2021, telling investors that one must buy them only if they “are prepared to lose all their money.”
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