Digital currencies strengthen the resilience and efficiency of payment systems but if poorly designed, they could also lead to financial stability and integrity risks, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said.
For this, the IMF is working on a platform for central bank digital currencies (CDBCs) to face risks related to this transformation.
"CBDCs should not be fragmented national propositions... To have more efficient and fairer transactions we need systems that connect countries: we need interoperability," Georgieva told a conference attended by African central banks in Rabat, Morocco.
"For this reason, at the IMF, we are working on the concept of a global CBDC platform," she said.
Georgieva stressed that work should be done to make digital transactions a success in three ways, by giving more people access to financial services, and at a lower cost, strengthening the resilience and efficiency of payment systems, and making cross-border payments and remittances cheaper and quicker.
The IMF wants central banks to agree on a common regulatory framework for digital currencies that will allow global interoperability. Failure to agree on a common platform would create a vacuum that would likely be filled by cryptocurrencies, she said.
A CBDC is a digital currency controlled by the central bank, while cryptocurrencies are nearly always decentralized.
Already 114 central banks are at some stage of CBDC exploration, "with about 10 already crossing the finish line", she said.
"If countries develop CDBCs only for domestic deployment we are underutilizing their capacity," she added.
CBDCs could also help promote financial inclusion and make remittances cheaper, she said, noting that the average cost of money transfers amounted to $44 billion annually.
Bank Al-Maghrib (BAM) and the IMF organized a conference under the theme “The Role of the Public Sector in Money and Payments - A New Vision.”
Governor of Morocco's Central Bank Abdellatif Jouahri highlighted the significance of the conference in reinforcing financial solutions, enabling citizens’ access to monetary services, and assisting expats in sending transfers from abroad.
Jouahri further extended thanks to the IMF for supporting Marrakesh’s hosting of the IMF and the World Bank meetings next October.
The conference brought together senior officials from international and Arab financial institutions and regulatory bodies to examine the implications of the central bank’s digital currencies on monetary policy, financial stability, financial inclusion, and international payments.
