Central Bank Digital Currency (“CBDC”)
The Bank of Thailand (“BoT”) is planning to launch the Retail CBDC by the second quarter of 2022 which will contribute Thai people accessing to more convenience and secure financial services.
The main reason is that due to the digital financial world, cryptocurrency has been extensively used as an intermediate for exchanging value besides cash leading to the decrease in the role of financial institutions. Therefore, central banks across the world are increasingly studying the feasibility of using a system of recording information known as ‘blockchain’ to enhance payment systems and issue CBDC with the purpose of using it as an intermediate for exchanging value that will represent use of money.
At present, corporate payments are made through banks and processed in job scheduling and executed in batches. As a result, corporates confront with a number of issues, such as cut-off time, daily cash management, handling various payment instruction formats from multiple banks for transactions.
CBDC, as a digital cash on hand is promptly transferable, can moderate such issues on a regular basis, for example, corporates can transfer and receive CBDC on a real-time basis in the same way as people transact with cash. Therefore, it can be said that the CBDC is the future of payments in the business sector which would increase the efficiency and flexibility of payments for corporates.
Legal Insight Vol. April 2021 of Bangkok Global Law
The PDF file can be downloaded via the link as set below.