The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and Indonesia’s G20 Presidency, through Bank Indonesia, launched the third G20 TechSprint Initiative, focusing on developing new solutions for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). 

The G20 TechSprint Initiative 2022 is an international competition to explore innovation and develop cutting-edge sustainable technological solutions. It is open to participants from around the world. This year’s “hackathon” invites global innovators to develop new solutions for issuing and distributing CBDCs; use them to advance financial inclusion and improve interoperability between payments systems following successful initiatives on regulatory and supervision compliance and green finance solutions in previous years. 

The BIS Innovation Hub and Bank Indonesia have published three problem statements in the following categories for the 2022 TechSprint:

• Building effective and robust means to issue, distribute and transfer CBDCs. There is a need to optimise various processes. New capabilities, such as programmability of money, could also result in provisioning of new and innovative services to customers.
• Enabling financial inclusion: CBDCs also offer an opportunity to deepen financial inclusion and to overcome barriers facing the unbanked and underbanked. 
• Improving interoperability: CBDCs can help to improve and enable connections and linkages in payment systems, enhancing connectivity and interoperability

Agustín Carstens, general manager of BIS said, “There is a collective belief that CBDCs have potential for promoting the public interest in this age of digital money. Trust in money is the glue that holds the financial system together. It is for this reason that, as technology advances, central banks must ensure that the monetary system remains fundamentally a public good and preserve its stability”.

Perry Warjiyo, governor of Bank Indonesia mentioned that the ultimate goals of CBDCs can be achieved by recognising the importance of collective understanding of its technology and inclusive collaboration among major developed countries and emerging economies, which has always been the core purpose of the G20.  “Through the G20 TechSprint 2022, we aim to foster and challenge the international community to propose and deliver the most practical and deployable solutions in designing and implementing CBDCs.”

How to participate

Interested participants can compete and develop innovative solutions to these problems using the appointed APIX hackathon platform, which facilitates registration, prototype building and online judging of project proposals.

• Shortlisted teams will be announced in mid-June 2022 and will be invited to showcase their prototypes in a workshop in July for feedback from national authorities and invited experts.  
• An independent panel of experts will choose the winning solutions, to be announced in October. 
• The winners for each category will receive an award of IDR 770 million ($53,000). All short-listed projects receive a stipend of IDR 145 million ($10,000).

Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker