The Qatar Central Bank (QCB) is considering various aspects of financial technology and is also exploring the use of a central bank digital currency for the country.
QCB’s head of fintech, Alanood Abdullah Al-Muftah, told The Peninsula that the Qatar Central Bank intends to determine its direction on the CBDC issue. He also noted that a clearer direction for research will be defined in the next few months.
Al-Muftah said that the development of the country’s financial sector will directly depend on the research of digital banks and fintech companies. Therefore, Qatar has started to actively study the possibility and prospects of implementing digital currency by the Central Bank. However, the question remains open for now.
In this regard, Qatar’s largest private bank, Dukhan Bank, has started to actively explore the possibilities of blockchain technology in the payment space. But according to Narayanan Srinivasan, director of digital technology, the bank will only be ready to talk about creating a CBDC after a thorough study of digital asset infrastructure and the crypto economy.
Srinivasan also added that the digital bank format is one of the main areas that Dukhan Bank plans to develop. But there is no rush on this issue, as they “need to figure out the economics behind it,” he explained. So for now, Dukhan Bank intends to launch only new electronic services during the year, including e-kiosk.Recall that in 2020, the Qatar Financial Center’s Office of Government Regulation and Control banned digital asset services in the state. Since then, a large number of banks in Europe and the Far East began to actively work with virtual assets, so the government of Qatar has decided to start exploring such a possibility in their country as well.
