Temenos, a banking software company, is making strides in digital currency innovation by successfully demonstrating consumer Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) wallet capabilities built on the Temenos banking platform.
Central banks worldwide are progressing with CBDC projects, and retail CBDC often requires private sector digital wallets for consumers to securely acquire, hold, and spend digital currency. Commercial banks are expected to play a crucial role as primary CBDC distributors, much like they do with physical cash today, due to their operational capabilities, large customer bases, and brand trust.
Temenos has integrated its banking platform with CBDC platforms like Hyperledger Besu and R3 Corda, allowing banks using the Temenos platform to interact with CBDC systems seamlessly. The recent proof-of-concept demonstrated several key use cases:
1. Secure Wallet Creation:
Temenos showed how it could securely create a new wallet, generating a private key within the Temenos Visualiser app runtime and using the phone’s secure enclave for key encryption.
2. Offline Payments:
The demonstration included offline payments using near field communication (NFC) for contactless transactions. One device acted as an HCE (Host Card Emulation) device, while the other functioned as an NFC reader. Cryptographically signed transaction data was exchanged between devices without requiring an internet connection.
3. Transaction Synchronization:
Devices kept records of offline transactions locally, tracked settled and unsettled balances, and synchronized with the core ledger via Temenos’ fulfilment service to settle transactions and update the available balance in the mobile wallet.
Temenos’ innovation series aims to explore the future of digital currencies, and this latest proof-of-concept highlights the platform’s potential to support a range of CBDC wallet features. It represents a step toward a complete end-to-end vision of retail CBDC, including issuance, distribution, and exchange between central banks, commercial banks, and consumers’ digital wallets.
