Central Bank of Jamaica Collaborates With Government to Accelerate CBDC Adoption

Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) which is the peak bank in the Jamaican region is mulling plans to collaborate with the government to facilitate and promote the use of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) known as JamDex as a viable means of payment. 

Speaking about the reason behind the introduction of a CBDC, Dr. Novelette Panton, Division chief of the Financial Markets Infrastructure Division, Bank of Jamaica, said that it was targeted more toward the financial inclusion of its citizens.

She made this statement while speaking on “Digital Currency as a Pathway to Financial Inclusion” at the Fintech Islands Experience Summit which was held between October 5th and 7th at Hilton Barbados Hotel.

Explaining to the moderator of the discussion Annalee Babb, a consultant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade in the Government of Barbados, Panton said, “This forms part of the digital transformation of the country. We want a means of payment that would further digitize the ecosystem, so we introduced JamDex.”

BOJ to Onboard More Subscribers on Lynk

Following an eight-month-long pilot phase, the Jamaican CBDC expansion project began this year through the National Commercial Bank (NCB) subsidiary Lynk, a mobile wallet provider. As of the end of September, the platform had recorded about 115,000 subscribers who had performed 146,000 transactions in total. 

Panton continued “They have gone so far as to get merchants on board because it makes no sense you have a digital currency and people don’t know where to spend it.”

Compared to the entire Jamaica population of over 2 million people, the subscribers on the Lynk platform are only about 4% of its population.

This shows that the country is still short of its aim to further financial inclusion with the JamDex CBDC. However, Panton announced that BOJ is working with Lynk to engage corner shops and pan chicken vendors to use the mobile wallet and, by extension, conduct transactions with JamDex.

Bank of Jamaica is not the only financial institution in North American territory that is fast considering CBDC. This year, the Bank of Canada partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to conduct research on the development of a CBDC, although it had started warming up towards issuing its own national digital currency in 2019.