A digital dollar could streamline settlements to make financial markets more efficient, according to a report published Wednesday by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., the financial-infrastructure giant that has a hand in virtually every trade on the more than $40 trillion U.S. stock market.
DTCC said its report is the first-ever private-sector probe of what a central bank digital currency (CBDC) would mean for post-trade financial markets – the infrastructure that processes securities deals after a price has been agreed upon.
“This new initiative represents the essence of innovation … we should expect digital transformation to reshape markets and market structure in the coming years,” DTCC Managing Director Jennifer Peve said in a statement, referring to a program carried out with the nonprofit Digital Dollar Project and major banks such as Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC) and State Street (STT) to test the use of a digital dollar in financial markets.
“A U.S. CBDC should be carefully explored in consultation with key stakeholders across the public and private sectors," Peve said.
A CBDC could help speed up settlement, in part by automating reports the DTCC must send to the Federal Reserve, the DTCC said. It cited evidence that distributed-ledger technology could save billions of dollars per year by simplifying how trades are confirmed and reconciled.
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In August, DTCC announced it was processing as many as 160,000 trades per day on a blockchain via Project Ion. The Bank for International Settlements has said as many as nine in 10 of the world’s central banks are looking at a CBDC, although Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has suggested he is in no rush to issue a digital dollar.