Xi Da Pu Ben, the news of expanding the encirclement of the digital RMB pilot area has been finalized.
On April 2, the central bank announced that on the basis of the existing pilot areas, six cities hosting the Asian Games in Tianjin, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Fujian, Fuzhou, Xiamen and Zhejiang were added as pilot areas; In addition, there are market institutions that send out benefits. On the same day, the reporter of Beijing business daily learned from meituan that the platform provides digital RMB livelihood consumption subsidies to the third batch of pilot urban residents, and can receive a digital RMB consumption gift bag worth 40 yuan after completing the registration.
What are the highlights of the pilot of digital RMB? How does it affect the market? What is the future?
newly added Tianjin, Chongqing, Guangzhou and other places
“At present, digital RMB has formed a number of application modes covering Wuxi Online Offline Communication Information Technology Co.Ltd(300959) , replicable and popularized in the fields of wholesale and retail, catering, culture and tourism, government payment, etc. major pilot projects such as the scenes of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games and the winter Paralympic Games have been successfully completed, the pilot users, merchants and transaction scale have increased steadily, and the market response is good.” The central bank recently held a symposium on the pilot work of digital RMB R & D.
The meeting pointed out that with the further promotion of the pilot test, digital RMB R & D faces new situations and problems in highlighting convenience, optimizing inclusiveness, highlighting innovation, ensuring security, reflecting compliance and strengthening sustainability, which need to be further studied and explored.
Based on this, the central bank proposed to expand the scope of the pilot in an orderly manner and add six cities hosting the Asian Games in Tianjin, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Fujian, Fuzhou, Xiamen and Zhejiang as the pilot areas on the basis of the existing pilot areas. Beijing and Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province will be turned into the pilot areas after the completion of the pilot scenes of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games and winter Paralympic Games.
The reporter of Beijing business daily noted that before the pilot expansion, the “10 + 1” pilot of digital RMB has been carried out since October 2020. The digital RMB pilot has been carried out in Shenzhen, Suzhou, xiong’an, Chengdu, Shanghai, Hainan, Changsha, Xi’an, Qingdao, Dalian and the scene of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, basically covering different regions such as the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, Beijing Tianjin Hebei, central, western, northeast and northwest. By the end of 2021, there had been more than 8.0851 million pilot scenarios, 261 million personal wallets had been opened, and the transaction amount was 87.565 billion yuan.
For the expansion of the pilot, Wang Pengbo, a senior analyst in the financial industry of Broadcom consulting, believes that on the basis of the success of the pilot in the early stage, digital RMB will further accelerate the popularization of the pilot, which is expected to cover more scenes of retail and life services faster, better enable digital RMB to settle in the real economy and people’s lives, and promote the inclusive and availability of digital RMB in a wider range.
Su Xiaorui, senior analyst of Analysys financial industry, also said that digital RMB has accumulated rich application experience, the frequency of use continues to increase, the number of opened wallets continues to expand, showing a good development trend, which is in line with previous expectations and can lay a solid foundation for subsequent pilot work.
sign up and receive a 40 yuan gift package
After the pilot expansion, some giants have been moved by the wind.
On April 2, the reporter of Beijing business daily learned from meituan that the platform issued digital RMB consumption subsidies to the residents of the third batch of pilot cities. From now on, residents of 11 new pilot cities of digital RMB, such as Guangzhou, Tianjin and Chongqing, can open meituan app to search for “digital RMB”. After completing the registration, they can receive a digital RMB consumption gift bag worth 40 yuan.
The consumption subsidy covers more than 200 kinds of daily consumption scenes of people’s livelihood, such as offline clothing, food, housing and transportation of urban residents. Consumers can use it when they want to taste digital RMB, such as dining in the store or taking out, shopping, watching movies and so on.
Beijing Business Daily reporter learned that there is no threshold for event registration. New digital RMB users can participate after downloading and registering digital RMB app. Taking the consumer Mi Ming (pseudonym) as an example, the digital RMB red envelope he signed up for has arrived immediately, which can be directly deducted when ordering takeout, buying fresh food and watching movies. He ordered a freshly squeezed fruit juice with the price of 13 yuan, used the received 10 yuan digital RMB red envelope, superimposed with 3 yuan coupons, and finally paid 0 yuan, which is equivalent to drinking a glass of fruit juice free of charge with digital RMB.
Beijing Business Daily reporter noted that this is also the first important action of digital RMB scene support institutions after the news of digital RMB pilot expansion. While experiencing the new payment experience, users can also enjoy the full scene red envelope discount of digital RMB.
In addition to meituan, the reporter of Beijing Business Daily also asked ant, jd.com, Baidu, didi and other platforms whether there were corresponding measures, but as of press time, the latter has not responded yet.
In Su Xiaorui’s view, meituan’s payment of people’s livelihood consumption subsidies can be viewed from two aspects. On the one hand, the daily people’s livelihood consumption scene belongs to a small and high-frequency retail consumption scene, which is the “just need” of the public in their daily life. Combining these scenes to promote digital RMB has relatively high efficiency and is also consistent with the basic characteristics of digital RMB; On the other hand, with the help of large local living platforms such as meituan, reaching the majority of users with such subsidy actions can also consolidate meituan’s own influence among users and help improve meituan’s own user activity.
In the view of the industry, more scene parties are needed to participate in the follow-up, expand the pilot scale, and tap and accumulate more experience in operation, technology and promotion.
increase pilot application and ecosystem construction
The central bank said that since 2017, the central bank, together with all participating institutions and with the strong support of the party committees and governments in the pilot areas, has comprehensively grasped and carefully organized, steadily carried out the pilot, dynamically improved the business technology design, continuously innovated the application scenarios, focused on solving the difficult and painful problems of financial services, and preliminarily verified the feasibility and reliability of the theories, policies, businesses and technologies related to digital RMB.
The meeting stressed that the digital RMB R & D pilot should adhere to the “people’s character” and play a greater role in expanding the coverage of financial services, improving the level of inclusive financial services, helping local economic development, supporting the construction of digital government, improving the quality and efficiency of financial services to the real economy, and improving the business environment.
In the follow-up, we should adhere to marketization. In the process of the development, promotion and popularization of digital RMB, policy design should fully stimulate the enthusiasm and creativity of financial institutions, science and technology enterprises, local governments and other parties, and encourage competition in promoting the operation; We should adhere to the rule of law, carry out all work in accordance with the law, carry out legal construction in a forward-looking manner, ensure the security of the digital RMB system, grasp the relationship between privacy protection and crime prevention, and deeply study the potential impact on the financial system and other aspects.
“It can be expected that in terms of scenarios, the follow-up types are expected to be richer. From the original pilot of small retail, it is gradually extended to the fields of large-scale payment and cross-border payment. It is suggested that large platforms with rich Internet facilities and a broad user base should actively participate in the digital RMB pilot project.” Su Xiaorui said,
For the follow-up digital RMB pilot, Wang Pengbo mentioned three directions. The first is to continue to cover more small and high-frequency consumption scenes. For example, the Internet platform can be used to improve the coverage of merchants and scenes.
Second, we can explore more operation modes. Issuing one-time red envelopes is a good way to attract unused digital RMB users, but in addition, we can also explore some modes that can cycle for many times and increase user stickiness, such as issuing red envelope consumption vouchers in combination with some Internet consumption portals. This mode is different from the activity of ending relevant services by issuing consumption vouchers only once, It can form a long-term sustainable model of win-win for users, merchants, platforms and digital RMB.
Third, we can make some promotion innovations around the characteristics of digital RMB. Wang Pengbo said that the characteristics of digital RMB, such as “payment is settlement”, “smart contract carrying” and “dual flow unification of information flow and capital flow”, will promote payment transactions more convenient, and are especially suitable for solving the existing problems in the fields of directional payment and credit financing. Therefore, from the perspective of scenario, we can also explore more the application of digital RMB in b-end payment and corporate payment.
