Test the water in many places to issue digital yuan wages [ The use scenarios are becoming more and more abundant, and experts suggest that the key to popularization is "easy to use"]
Recently, the Changshu Local Financial Supervision Administration of Jiangsu Province and the Changshu Municipal Bureau of Finance issued a notice that starting from May, the full digital yuan payment of the salaries of civil servants (including public service personnel), public institution personnel, and personnel of state-owned units at all levels in the city has aroused widespread concern. Industry experts believe that local governments fully use digital yuan to pay salaries, which is the landing of digital yuan in government affairs scenarios, indicating that local governments' efforts to promote digital yuan are still strengthening, which is conducive to the further popularization of digital yuan, I believe that more cities will follow in the future, and the convenience and versatility of digital yuan will become higher and higher.
Many places use digital yuan to pay salaries
It is understood that in April 2020, the central bank announced the first four pilot areas of digital yuan, including Suzhou, Chengdu, Shenzhen and Xiong'an. In recent years, the list of pilot areas has been expanded. As of April 4, the scope of the digital yuan pilot has been expanded to more than 2023 regions in 4 provinces (cities). Previously, some pilot areas have tried to use digital yuan to pay full or partial wages to specific groups.
According to public reports, in May 2020, half of the transportation subsidies for the salaries of staff of district-level organs, enterprises and institutions in Xiangcheng District of Suzhou were distributed in the form of digital yuan. Since then, other districts and counties in Suzhou have followed suit. As of June last year, a total of 5,6 people in Wujiang District of Suzhou and state-owned enterprises have achieved digital RMB payroll.
Since May 2021, Changsha has selected six budget units, including the Kaifu Branch of the Changsha Municipal Public Security Bureau and the Changsha Flood Control and Drought Control Material Reserve Management Center, to carry out the pilot of digital RMB wage payment. In March last year, the number of budget units participating in the pilot was expanded to 5, including finance, urban construction, urban management, public security, market supervision, social security and other units and departments. As of March 6, Changsha has organized pilot banks to pay a total of 3.37 million yuan in digital RMB wages to 2022,3 employees in 37 pilot budget units.
In Sichuan, at the end of March this year, Bank of China Meishan Branch successfully issued the first digital RMB salary for civil servants to the Meishan Municipal Bureau of Finance, which is the first digital RMB payment for administrative institutions in Meishan City, marking a new breakthrough in the construction of the city's digital RMB government affairs scene.
It cannot be used for deposits and wealth management yet
A relevant person from the Suzhou branch of a state-owned bank said that the use of digital yuan to pay wages is very convenient for units and employees from the perspective of process. After the unit opens the corporate wallet, it does not need to collect the employee's bank card account number, only needs to enter the employee's name and mobile phone number to pay the employee's personal wallet, and can also realize cross-regional and cross-bank distribution in the pilot area, and there is no restriction on the bank opening the account.
For employees, there is no need to go to a bank branch, just download the "digital yuan" APP, open a personal digital currency type II wallet online, and receive salaries. After receiving the salary, you can freely transfer to the bound common bank card, there is no handling fee, and you can also use digital yuan for convenient payment.
How to use digital currency salary? Xiao Lin, a unit in Suzhou, said that after receiving a digital yuan salary every month, he immediately transferred the money back to his salary card through the function of "deposit bank".
Xiaolin said that he also knows that many merchants and platforms can pay with digital yuan, and there are more and more scenarios where digital yuan can be used. However, the digital yuan cannot currently deposit and manage money, nor can it automatically deduct living expenses, and when transferring money, the other party also needs to open a digital currency wallet, which is her daily needs. If you keep a part of the digital yuan for consumption every month, and then transfer some back to the salary card, you feel very troublesome, and it is not as convenient as transferring all of it back to the bank card.
A reporter from Beijing Youth Daily found that many people who received digital yuan wages were like Xiaolin, and as soon as their wages arrived in their digital yuan wallets, they were transferred to the bound salary card. However, some people who have "played" with the digital yuan said that this form is more welcome, because there are many relevant offers launched by banks.
Before the Mid-Autumn Festival last year, Mr. Wang, an employee of a technology company in Beijing, received a 500 yuan holiday fee issued by the company in digital yuan. He used the money to treat a friend to dinner at a restaurant, which happened to be a promotion offer for digital yuan, saving 50 yuan when he paid the bill. In Mr. Wang's view, after opening a digital yuan wallet, ordinary people recharge their bank cards or receive red envelopes from others. With digital RMB salaries, the source of funds is more abundant, and it will also increase the opportunities for everyone to use digital RMB.
Mr. Wang stressed that there is no fee for transferring the digital yuan back to the bank card, while both WeChat wallet and Alipay have withdrawal fees. In addition, the digital yuan of some mobile phone models can also pay without electricity and no network, and the mobile phone can also be paid by "touching and touching" when the mobile phone is out of battery, which cannot be done by other mobile payment methods.
Expert: Versatility needs to be strengthened
Pan Helin, co-director and researcher of the Digital Economy and Financial Innovation Research Center of Zhejiang University International Business School, pointed out that the current digital RMB pilot is in full swing, and there are more and more available scenarios for digital RMB, but there are also areas for improvement.
First of all, the convenience of digital RMB application still needs to be improved. Pan and Lin believe that the current digital yuan payment process is more cumbersome, in the digital wallet, the balance is divided and stored in different sub-wallets, and each payment scenario must be signed separately. For example, if you have signed a contract in Alipay, you must sign a separate contract when you encounter Meituan, Ele.me, Jingdong and other application payments. The digital yuan itself is an alternative to cash, but for now, it is not easy to use cash. Cash has only one identity attribute: the cash of the central bank should not be the cash of ICBC, ABC, and BOC, and the sub-wallet of the current digital yuan APP actually adds additional identity attributes to cash. Pan and Lin stressed that convenience is the foundation of popularization, and hope that the digital yuan will further enhance convenience in the future.
He also believes that the versatility of the digital yuan needs to be strengthened. In the digital era, some payment tools, APP developers only need to embed a piece of code of the payment tool into the program to form a payment function, which greatly enhances the efficiency of payment tools docking payment scenarios. At present, the digital yuan adopts the mode of opening payment application scenarios one by one, which will limit the use scenarios of digital yuan.
"We have to see that the digital yuan app is essentially an APP. No app is set in stone. Therefore, it is not so much that the digital yuan is inadequate, but that we need an orderly idea of long-term iteration of the digital yuan. And the key to this idea is two words: easy to use. Pan and Lin said.
Text/Reporter Cheng Jie Coordinator/Yu Meiying