Yesterday FIS, the banking sector solution provider, announced plans to help central banks to launch central bank digital currencies (CBDC) through its CBDC Virtual Lab, which is in collaboration with digital payments startup M10 Networks.
The Lab will let central banks, commercial banks and payment firms experiment and pilot CBDC issuance, payments, programmable money and offline payments. Its scope spans retail CBDC, wholesale and cross border payments.
M10 claims the platform can scale to more than a million transactions per second with less than a second latency.
FIS is one of 21 finalists in the G20 TechSprint hackathon for CBDC.
It has been involved in the digital currency and blockchain sectors for years. Recently its Worldpay subsidiary announced that conventional businesses that use Worldpay to collect card and other payments could receive these payouts in the USDC stablecoin.
In 2019, FIS partnered with VISA to roll out its blockchain-based VISA B2B Connect solution. It has also worked with Polish startup Billon for blockchain-based emoney solutions. And both FIS and subsidiary WorldPay have been engaged with cryptocurrencies since at least 2019 through involvements with Crypto.org’s blockchain as well as public permissioned blockchains Hedera Hashgraph and Korea’s Klaytn.
Meanwhile, M10 was founded by the former CMO of open banking platform Token. Its focus is on account-based payments, and it doesn’t use blockchain.
Other major payment platforms providing CBDC offerings include Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal.