BCW was part of the Ripple and Fubon Bank-led pilot in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority #CBDC eHKD pilot program as program managers and infrastructure providers. The program explored tokenising property to enable #HELOC loans.
The HKMA’s exploration of e-HKD fits within a wider narrative of increased consumer access and convenience through digital transformation of banking, payments, and markets. Through the e-HKD Pilot Programme, the HKMA is studying the potential use cases for a retail central bank digital currency (rCBDC), which is a tokenised form of money potentially residing on a blockchain, that has the full backing of the monetary authority. Phase 1 of the Pilot Programme was conducted in 2023 with Ripple and Fubon Bank, in consortium with a group of technology providers, developing one of twelve pilots.
The consortium’s focus was a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) solution, leveraging digital assets to offer innovative lending options. The pilot tested a digital platform enabling homeowners to borrow against their property’s equity, providing a glimpse into the future of financial services.
At the core of the pilot was the Ripple CBDC platform, incorporating private blockchains for value storage and EVM-compatible business logic execution. Residing on this EVM-compatible blockchain was a lending protocol smart contract and UI developed by Kodelab, which locked a tokenised asset, in this case, the bank’s claim on the mortgaged property, in a vault that dispensed funds and collected repayments all through a friendly user interface.
As an enterprise-focused blockchain venture studio, BCW Group has worked with a wide range of large corporations to adopt this technology holistically. The key to successful development, as in the case of the Ripple and Fubon Bank HELOC loan concept, is to bring the technology input into the business conversation early. This approach enables the exciting transformational characteristics of the technology to empower business strategizing and opportunity exploration.
