The Mexican government is studying the implementation of a digital currency aimed at promoting financial inclusion in a country where a large part of transactions are still carried out in cash.
Faced with the rise of cryptocurrencies, governments are increasingly interested in innovations in payments. Thus, many countries want to launch their digital currency. This is particularly the case of Mexico, which aims for circulation by 2024.
According to the government, this would promote financial inclusion in a country where a large part of transactions are still carried out in cash. The challenge is significant given that the informal economy represented in 2020 more than 20% of the national GDP. Mexico’s central bank believes it is important “To use these new technologies and latest generation payment infrastructures as valuable options to advance financial inclusion in the country”, declared the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Twitter.
Bitcoin is not welcome in Mexico
The launch of this digital currency should however take place in several phases. As a first step, the Mexican central bank will use the current electronic payment system as the basis of the new platform, so as to expand the payment options. “In a fast, safe and efficient environment”, said the institution in a recent report.
Beyond offering a more modern payment system to Mexicans, this digital currency would allow the central bank to distance itself a little more from cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It has also warned on several occasions against the risks associated with these crypto-assets, in particular because of their volatility. However, Mexican personalities do not hide their interest in cryptocurrencies.
In June 2021, billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the third richest person in Mexico, revealed that he wanted to make Banco Azteca the first bank in the country to accept bitcoin. But in September, Alejandro Díaz de León, governor of the Bank of Mexico, dismissed it as reliable legal tender. The Ministry of Finance and banking regulators have taken the same position, prohibiting de facto banks to offer operations with this type of asset.
Soon several national digital currencies in circulation?
Mistrust of bitcoin, which crossed a new historic threshold in 2021 with a price of over $ 68,000, is still very strong among financial institutions around the world, but state-initiated digital currency projects are growing. multiply. Note that a digital currency would not replace cash. It would be placed in addition to a physical fiduciary currency. Concretely, it would be the equivalent of a coin or a banknote stored in an application or on a card.
China, one of the most advanced countries on the subject, is also in the process of launching the digital yuan, the future means of electronic payment on smartphones that could potentially replace the coins and banknotes bearing the inescapable image of Mao. The Communist regime should also use the Beijing Winter Olympics (February 4-20, 2022) as a springboard for its cryptocurrency.
On the Old Continent, a digital euro is also in the making, but the European Central Bank (ECB), which is currently working on the file, estimates that it will not be accessible to inhabitants of the euro zone until 2026. The Bahamas are the first country in the world to have taken the plunge by launching the sand dollar in October 2020. According to a report published at the end of the year by JP Morgan and the firm Oliver Wyman, the establishment of an international network of multiple digital currencies of central banks would allow companies in the world to save nearly 100 billion dollars per year in transaction costs related to cross-border payments.