China’s digital currency: Bank of China helps mainland tourists spend e-CNY in Hong Kong at select retailers

Bank of China Hong Kong kicked off a new e-CNY trial at more than 200 outlets on Tuesday with a new shopping festival for people travelling from the mainland
It is the bank’s third e-CNY trial in the city as it seeks to help test cross-border payments of China’s sovereign digital currency

China digital currency

Xinmei Shen

Published: 7:00pm, 18 Jul 2023

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Bank of China Hong Kong (BOCHK) is allowing mainland customers to shop with e-CNY, China’s sovereign digital currency, at more than 200 retail outlets in the city, as the bank seeks to boost cross-border use of the digital yuan.

BOCHK’s new “cross-border shopping festival” allows Bank of China clients to pay with e-CNY at retailers in Hong Kong – including U Select, CDF Beauty and Lung Fung Dispensary – the bank said in a statement on Tuesday, the start of the festival.

The move comes after two smaller trials conducted in the past year, and is aimed at “further promoting the cross-border applications of e-CNY”, BOCHK said in a statement.

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Chen Guang, BOCHK’s deputy general manager of the digital currency task force, said that the “shopping festival” is launching now because July and August are traditionally the busy tourist season. The bank hopes the promotion will help retailers in the city attract customers, he added.

The campaign runs through October 31, BOCHK said.

Last year, BOCHK launched a programme encouraging customers to set up the BOC e-CNY wallet to receive digital red packets worth 100 yuan that could be used to buy goods at 14 locations of the local supermarket chain U Select across Hong Kong.

BOCHK, one of the three note-issuing banks in the city, in February this year called for Hong Kong residents to register for the bank’s e-CNY red packets to shop with digital yuan in mainland China.

While e-CNY trials in the city are under way as Hong Kong aims to strengthen its role as an international offshore yuan trading centre, the city is also testing its own CBDC. In May, Hong Kong launched an e-HKD trial that tasked 16 banks and payment companies with selecting small groups of clients to test specific uses for the digital currency.

The trial focused on six uses: online payments, payments in shops and restaurants, collecting government payouts, tokenised deposits and asset settlement, and Web3 trading and clearing, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said at the time.

BOCHK and the city’s two other note-issuing banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank, took part in that trial. The results will be announced in November, but the HKMA has made no indication about when or if it would seek to broadly roll out a digital version of the Hong Kong dollar.

Trials of e-CNY in the mainland have rapidly expanded over the past four years, but there is still no timeline for an official launch.

There are now 26 pilot cities and 5.6 million merchants using China’s digital yuan, which is accessible through the official e-CNY app and third-party payment systems like Alipay and WeChat Pay. By the end of last year, 13.61 billion yuan of e-CNY had been spent in a variety of contexts.

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