12/31/2023 – 13:28
Around the world, central banks are racing to design official digital currencies to facilitate money transfers and digitize payments. As Brazil has already done both, the digital real, or Drex, should be born a few steps ahead of similar experiences, with a greater focus on transactions of greater value and complexity.
“Drex is a complement to Pix, not a replacement”, says the senior manager of Business Strategy in Financial Services at Accenture, Ricardo Pandur. “Pix served retail, individuals and commerce very well, but we have a capital market, high value and transactions between companies that Drex will attack first.”
The expert states that in China and Europe, so-called central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) try to reduce the use of cash in payments, something that Pix has already done in Brazil. In the United Arab Emirates, the objective is to facilitate international transfers, a utility that Pix should also gain soon.
In the view of participants in the Drex pilot, led by the Central Bank, digital currency will not be a product, but rather an operations platform. “Pix brought digitalization to payments and to some extent, to money. What needs to become a Ferrari is the infrastructure that manages other assets”, says Pedro Alves de Lima, regulatory affairs specialist at Nubank.
Banco do Brasil's information technology executive, Julierme de Souza, states that Drex will be that platform. “Drex will not be used to buy a bullet, for that we have Pix. It will be used for operations that require trust, and to have access to more sophisticated financial products.” This includes real estate financing, but also the purchase of investment products.
Forward
The market estimates that there are more than a hundred official digital currency projects in the world. As it is at the forefront, Brazil should become an example for many of these projects. “Brazil is very advanced, in a testing phase that is validating the functioning of the digital real”, says the CEO of Vórtx QR Tokenizadora, Fernando Carvalho.
He states that in Europe, for example, the European Central Bank hopes to have the digital euro in 2028. In the United States, there are digital representations of the dollar created by banks, such as JPMorgan Coin, created in 2019 and which is operated only between financial institutions .
Bradesco's Technology Director, Edilson Reis, sees Drex as an enabler or “standard” for the market to digitize assets and operations. He says this is possible because Brazil has already integrated other systems, such as payments. “Our financial operations have a high degree of sophistication, compared to other markets,” he says.
Banks began testing the waters before the BC pilot. Itaú Unibanco created a digital assets unit, Itaú Digital Assets, in 2022. “Digital Assets is another sign of how the bank thinks and helps not only the bank, but the market as a whole, to think purposefully ”, says Guto Antunes, executive in charge of the area.
At Santander Brasil, there is an exchange of experiences with the headquarters, in Spain, which has a center of excellence in blockchain (the technology on which digital assets are structured). “The protocol selected by the BC for the Drex pilot, the hyperledger besu, has coincidentally been studied by the center of excellence in Spain for some time”, says Jayme Chataque, Digital Assets and Blockchain executive at Santander.
Hard to explain
By targeting complex problems, Drex should be more difficult to explain to the general public than Pix, which has a more objective purpose – transferring money instantly. “Drex is closer to Open Finance, because it is an infrastructure”, says Pandur, from Accenture. “No one wakes up wanting to share data [via Open Finance]people want a better loan or card.”
BB's Technology Director, Rodrigo Mulinari, believes that banks will have the challenge of showing customers the benefit of Drex without having to explain to them how digital currency works. “Pix has enormous architectural complexity, but for the customer, it is very simple,” he says.
On the other hand, Drex and the mechanics of its operation can help traditional institutions solve a complex problem: the rejuvenation of the customer base. “We have a generation that is becoming bankable and tokenized, native to the cryptoeconomy. The challenge is to adapt the bank for this generation to enter.”
#Drex #complement #Pix #born #steps #ahead #international #39cousins39