In May 2020, HSBC and IBM partnered to jointly respond to the call for applications organised by Banque de France (BdF – France’s central bank), to experiment with the use of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) issued for interbank settlements.
The aim was to explore the potentialities offered by the Distributed Ledger Technology, and to identify concrete cases integrating CBDC in innovative procedures for the settlement of tokenised financial assets.
Three scenarios were put forward to showcase the capabilities and benefits of a wholesale CBDC implementation:
- Issuance and distribution of a CBDC
- Bond subscription in primary and secondary markets followed by coupon redemption
- Execution of cross border and cross network payments
The experiment report is available at https://www.gbm.hsbc.com/en-gb/feed/innovation-and-transformation/the-interoperability-of-cbdcs-across-networks-and-currencies