Former Director of the Central Bank Research Bureau: There are challenges in promoting digital renminbi, with a total pilot amount of only 100 billion yuan over two years

ChainCatcher news, according to Caixin, Xie Ping, a professor at Tsinghua University's Wudaokou School of Finance and former director of the Research Bureau of the People's Bank of China, stated at the "Frontier Academic Conference on Digital Finance" held by Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management that the idea of digital renminbi being merely a cash substitute used only in the consumption sector needs to change, as the results are not ideal.

The cumulative amount of the digital renminbi pilot program over two years is only 100 billion yuan. Although the pilot is not fully comparable, it also indicates that transaction usage is very low and quite inactive. There are currently about 9.3 billion bank cards, with a daily transaction volume reaching about 500 billion yuan. Today, cash, bank cards, and third-party payments have formed a payment market structure that meets consumers' daily payment needs, and the public has become accustomed to it, making it difficult to change.

Data released by the Research Institute of the People's Bank of China shows that as of August 31, 2022, the cumulative number of transactions in pilot areas across 15 provinces (municipalities) reached 360 million, with an amount of 100.04 billion yuan. The People's Bank of China's second-quarter payment system report indicates that the network payment business volume of non-bank payment institutions (third-party payments) exceeds 200 billion transactions daily, with a daily total of 1.31 trillion yuan. (source link)