Originally published in Farsi as «مطالعه IBM: اکثر شرکت های مالی جهانی فکر می کنند بانکهای مرکزی باید پولهای دیجیتال صادر کنند» on بلاک فارسی (BlockFarsi) — the blockchain news & education outlet I ran — on October 28, 2018; translated to English for this site. Original text recovered via the Wayback Machine.

As reported by BlockFarsi (via Cointelegraph): per the joint study by IBM Blockchain World Wire and the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) published October 25, most surveyed global financial institutions believe central banks should develop central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

Governments & CBDC

The study covers 21 central banks that participated in OMFIF's research between July and September 2017. The findings show participants failed to reach consensus on whether governments should issue their own cryptocurrencies, and split into several camps over the processes around managing & accessing these CBDCs.

76 percent of respondents reported uncertainty about the efficiency of distributed ledger technology (DLT), even as many of the surveyed financial institutions believed central banks should issue their own digital money. Meanwhile, 38 percent of the financial institutions in the study are actively investigating & experimenting with CBDCs, while the rest — 62 percent — are not active in the space at all.

Challenges

Beyond providing statistics on central-bank-issued digital currencies across global financial institutions, the report also lays out a number of approaches to building CBDCs, along with guidance for institutions on managing the associated challenges.

On October 23, a senior manager at the UK-based bank HSBC, Craig Ramsey, claimed that both CBDCs and blockchain deployment pose "a great challenge" to today's major real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment systems. Last week, Masayoshi Amamiya, deputy governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), claimed CBDCs are unlikely to improve existing monetary systems, since controlling the economy through CBDCs would only be effective if central banks removed paper money from the financial system.