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China digital currency: fintech giant Ant Group reveals partnership history with People’s Bank of China
- This is the first time that Ant Group has disclosed a detailed timeline of its work on China’s digital currency
- Both Ant Group and Tencent Holdings were showing off their involvement in the digital yuan roll-out at an industry event over the weekend
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Ant Group, which was ordered by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) to restructure its operations, has been working with the country’s central bank on the nation’s sovereign digital currency since 2017, according to information disclosed over the weekend.
At the Digital China Summit, an annual trade fair in the city of Fuzhou in southeastern Fujian province, both Ant and Tencent Holdings showed off through prominent posters at the event their history of cooperation with the PBOC on the digital yuan.
This is the first time that Ant, which called off its mega initial public offering in Hong Kong and Shanghai late last year, has disclosed a detailed timeline of its work on China’s digital currency. Ant is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.
Ant was invited to join the research and development of the digital yuan in late 2017, according to its poster. It also showed that MYbank, an Ant-backed online bank, became one of the operational institutions to offer the digital yuan.
In June 2019, China’s digital currency institute began to use Ant’s mobile app development platform mPaaS (mobile platform-as-a-service) to develop its app.
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