The state-run Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and telecommunications service giant China Mobile on Wednesday jointly announced the launch of a fiat digital-yuan hard wallet that allows equipped phones to transact in e-CNY without a mobile network.
Fast facts
The wallet, SIM Pay, is a super-SIM card with near-field communication (NFC) technology. NFC technology is already commonly in use in mass-transit and some credit cards and allows devices within a few centimeters to exchange data wirelessly. SIM Pay-equipped mobile phones can exchange the virtual asset information of the e-CNY by tapping each other.
China is pioneering the world’s first major central-bank digital currency, or CBDC. The electronic Chinese yuan, or e-CNY (alternately called the digital yuan, digital renminbi or e-RMB), is issued by the People’s Bank of China. It is currently being rolled out to Chinese consumers in a soft launch that began last year. Many expect China to formally launch the e-CNY by the Beijing Winter Olympics in February.
ICBC’s Suzhou Branch and Suzhou Mobile have agreed to jointly promote SIM Pay, and signed a cooperation agreement with the Suzhou Xiangcheng District Government to launch a local SIM card-based e-CNY pilot test.
Guan Yiminhai, deputy general manager of China Mobile Jiangsu, said at the SIM Pay press conference that aspects of the technology had been successfully achieved within the last year. Client-to-client (C2C) e-CNY transfer had been realized in November 2020, and client-to-business (C2B) transactions had been realized in February this year. A trial of 1,000 e-CNY SIM cards began in July.
China Mobile plans to provide users with more than 110 million such cards.