CEO of fintech giant Ant Group pledges support for digital yuan at Shanghai conference, promotes cross-blockchain use

Eric Jing Xiandong, chairman and CEO of fintech giant Ant Group, pledged support to the Chinese sovereign digital currency e-CNY in his latest public appearance at a conference in Shanghai, the country’s finance capital.

The e-CNY could be as valuable to the industrial internet as mobile payments were to the consumer internet, Jing said at the “Inclusion Conference on the Bund” on Thursday, according to Chinese media reports.

“Because the biggest feature of the e-CNY is programmability, it can ensure cross-chain communication between the payment blockchain and the business blockchain in the payment chain of yuan clearing, so that one party can perform the contract and the other party can automatically deliver it,” he explained. “This will bring huge synergy effects to the industry.”

Alipay, WeChat Pay urged to unify QR codes by China’s digital yuan chief

The People’s Bank of China first launched trials of the e-CNY at the end of 2019. Cities were selected based on factors such as major national development and coordinated regional expansion strategies, as well as location-specific industrial and economic factors. As trials expanded to dozens of cities across China, the technology powering the e-CNY has remained opaque. Digital yuan is not minted on a blockchain, but it has been made compatible with cross-border programmes like the mBridge with Hong Kong.

Mu Changchun, head of the Digital Currency Research Institute, the central bank agency responsible for developing the digital yuan, said at an industry forum earlier this week that mobile payment providers such as Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay and Ant’s Alipay should work to improve their interoperability and unify quick response (QR) codes for e-CNY payments.

Both apps support e-CNY payments, but not all types of mobile payments use the same QR code scheme.

The Inclusion Conference, which runs through Saturday, is being held for a second time after the first conference in 2020. China’s strict zero-Covid policies, which were finally eased last December, prevented the event from taking place in the last two years.

The conference is supported by the Shanghai Municipal Financial Regulatory Bureau and People’s Government of Huangpu District in Shanghai. It aims to “advance the exploration of financial technology and cutting-edge sciences” by hosting discussions between global technology leaders and scholars, including Ding Kuiling, president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Michael Jordan, an academic at the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering in the US.

Jing also referenced at the conference Ant’s efforts in artificial intelligence, on which every Big Tech firm in China is currently expending resources.

“The rise of large language models will reshape many commercial activities,” he said. “It’s like throwing a stone into a pool: you are seeing the first wave, such as replacing customer operations, marketing and sales.”

The theme of the conference this year is “technology for a sustainable future”. Topics of discussions at the event covered innovation of next-generation digital payments, safety issues related to large language models, and recommendations for sustainable development.

In a separate conference called the Bund Summit held in Shanghai in October 2020, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group Holding and its spin-off Ant Group, gave a controversial speech in which he said Chinese banks operated with a “pawnshop” mentality. Ten days later, the US$37 billion initial public offering of Ant Group in Shanghai and Hong Kong was called off by regulators at the last minute.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

South China Morning Post