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MARK LYNDERSAY

WiPay Caribbean of Jamaica and EMTECH of New York (futuremtech.com) on Thursday announced a development partnership to create a regional digital currency network for the Caribbean.
The new Wicoin project is being planned, according to a release, as "a working prototype of a secure digital platform for the movement of funds across the region."
EMTECH sees enormous potential in the region's business to customer (B2C) e-commerce market, currently valued at US$5 billion and growing at a healthy 25 per cent as fertile territory for the establishment of a digital currency mechanism.
WiPay's existing value transfer network serves more than 10,000 businesses in the region and central banks in the Caribbean have become more visibly proactive about creating their own national regulated digital currencies (CBDCs).
Many of these CBDC digital currency regimes have moved in recent months from sandboxing to pilot projects testing practical use and the security of the currencies.
The first nationwide CDBC was put into service in the Bahamas in October with the launch of the Sand Dollar.
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's D-Cash (http://ow.ly/Hk1u50DIbca) had its first practical proving on February 12 with a B2C transaction at Geo F Huggins' Foodland in Grenada.
The ECCB's D-Cash is scheduled for widespread public availability by the end of March 2021.
"We want to support regional trade using CBDCs," said WiPay CEO Aldwyn Wayne in an exclusive interview.
"WiPay's real value is in bringing this kind of interchange down to the level of individual use, making digital currencies available to customers and making trade using cryptocurrencies more pervasive."
A central bank digital currency is only for the country it is issued in, and WiPay can act as the intermediary between digital currencies from different islands, he said.
Wayne sees a key role for WiPay in the transition from traditional financial systems to FinTech and worries that attempts at digital currency lean too heavily on existing systems and metaphors for value exchange.
"The systems that are being built presume that banks are doing a good job of financial distribution," Wayne said.
"There is no third party in a CBDC. It is between the central bank and the customer and therefore there is no profit. Any financial change must have a value proposition, it has to operate above banking silos. A new system has to remove the barriers that block or discourage people from using a debit card if it is going to be successful. The only custodians and managers of money should not be legacy financial institutions."
In a press release this week, EMTECH founder and CEO Carmelle Cadet was quoted as saying: "Our partnership with WiPay paves the way to prove a model that not only digitises central banks with modern regulatory and currency platforms but also enables the paradigm shift where central bank digital currencies, stablecoins, and cryptocurrencies come together to achieve the goals of financial inclusion, integration and ultimately, the formation of a regional settlement network."
Cadet hopes for nothing less than the establishment of a Caribbean Fintech ecosystem that offers a pioneering model for global adoption of central bank regulated digital currencies.
In October, WiPay announced a regional partnership with MasterCard, one of the major financial services that plans to use digital currency distribution on its financial network.
In December, Wayne announced that he would be relocating the head office of WiPay by the middle of the year.
He has been vocal about the considerable friction his company faces in Trinidad and Tobago despite his enthusiasm to expand the company's operations here.
Of any participation by TT in any regional CBDC initiative, he noted that, "CBDCs are not on the radar in Trinidad so there is no discussion to be had here at this point."

Mark Lyndersay in the editor of technewstt.com
The post WiPay partners with New York tech firm to develop digital currency appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.