To present at ECB central banking forum
By Kim Byeo-ri, The Herald Business
The Bank of Korea announced Wednesday that Gov. Shin Hyun-song will attend the 96th Annual General Meeting of the Bank for International Settlements, to be held in Basel, Switzerland, among other events.
Shin is set to depart Thursday and return on July 2.
Starting Friday, he will take part in the BIS Annual Conference, the Economic Consultative Committee, the Global Economy Meeting, a board of directors meeting and the annual general meeting.
On July 1, Shin will join the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking — known as the Sintra Forum — in Sintra, Portugal, as a session presenter. The Sintra Forum is a high-level policy dialogue the ECB hosts annually, bringing together central bank governors, academics and market experts to discuss key financial and economic issues. It is widely regarded as the European equivalent of the Jackson Hole Symposium.
Shin plans to present a paper on the experience and implications of "Project Han River" in a session focused on the tokenization of money, payments and financial transactions, and to exchange views with participants.
Project Han River is an initiative in which the Bank of Korea issues a wholesale central bank digital currency based on blockchain technology, allowing participating financial institutions to issue "deposit tokens" as a linked payment instrument, then verifying whether financial consumers can use those tokens in everyday life without difficulty. The project is currently in its second phase.
The Bank of Korea earlier announced it had completed the platform build for Project Agora and would participate in live transaction testing.
Project Agora, led jointly by the BIS and the Institute of International Finance, is a public-private initiative designed to test whether wholesale central bank digital currencies and deposit tokens can enable more efficient cross-border payments.
kimstar@heraldcorp.com
