OUTGOING ANZ Group Holdings Ltd chief executive officer Shayne Elliott has suggested the digitisation of the national currency in order that the Government and the central bank stay in control of their currency base.
Or lose it to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general.
“Crypto…Bitcoin, I’m not a believer but that’s maybe because I’m old. I don’t understand the problem it solves, unless I’m a criminal. If I’m a criminal, then it solves a lot of problems because it’s an anonymous way to launder money. But if I’m not a criminal then I’m not sure about the problem it solves right now,” Mr Elliott said at a Reserve Bank of Fiji (RBF) presentation during his visit here last week.
“But there’s a flip side to crypto, which is obviously Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). I think that is interesting and I think that will potentially change the world.
“As the world continues to digitise, central banks, governments do not want to lose control of their currency base.
“If it goes to Bitcoin, you’ve lost control.
“So I imagine the central banks are working really hard to issue their own Fijian CBDC and probably call it digital Fijian dollar.
“Most central banks are certainly thinking about it. What that means is potentially it will reduce the cost of transaction – that’s the cost of moving money around — it makes that much faster in real time anywhere in the world and potentially reduces the cost to zero. That will unleash all sorts of innovation, I imagine,” Mr Elliott said.
He said Australia was already doing experiments on CBDCs and as part of that, ANZ had already launched the very first Australian dollar digital currency in the world.
In 2022, ANZ launched A$DC, the first ever Australian bank-issued stablecoin — a digital currency with a value linked to the Australian dollar. The A$DC was a result of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s research project on CBDC.
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are not recognised as legal tender in Fiji and RBF had issued a statement early this year reminding Fijians that it is illegal to purchase or invest in them.
Questions have been sent to RBF on whether it was exploring issuing its own CBDC.
