Almost a year since ANZ announced the successful execution of the first-ever stablecoin payment issued by an Australian bank, another major bank has announced it is joining the future of finance.

In a statement to InvestorDaily, Howard Silby, NAB’s executive director of innovation and partnerships, said NAB created its stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain in December.

“It is not yet available for wider use. We will soon begin testing our stablecoin with internal transactions before looking to expand use cases, working closely with the needs of our enterprise customers,” explained Mr. Silby.

Speaking about the bank's decision to join the stablecoin group, Mr Silby said: "We believe elements of the future of finance will be enabled by blockchain because it has the potential to help deliver instant, transparent and inclusive financial outcomes for customers like ours, the economy is becoming increasingly digitized."

"As a trusted financial institution, we have an important role to play in advancing the maturity of the blockchain-enabled sector."

NAB's focus, he noted, is very much on looking at use cases where there is high friction and clear customer benefit, particularly the larger businesses in the bank's corporate and institutional customer base.

“That could be in helping to provide instant settlement for corporate clients doing cross-border money transfer activities, or it could be in helping with things like carbon trading activities, which we know many of our clients are increasingly more interested in pursuing,” Mr Silby said.

Late last year, Reserve Bank (RBA) assistant governor Brad Jones said a central bank digital currency (CBDC) was still a "revolutionary" concept.

He explained that while the RBA has been involved in an eAUD pilot program with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Center (DFCRC) for several months, Australia is still a long way from introducing a general-purpose CBDC.

“In terms of the monetary economy, the introduction of a general-purpose CBDC would be revolutionary – for centuries, physical cash has been the only source of central bank-issued money that households and non-financial firms have had access to. Before this Rubicon can be crossed, strong public interest must first emerge,” the assistant governor revealed.

"At the end of the day, we haven't seen this case in Australia yet," he added.

Maja Garatsa Djurdjevic

Maya's career in journalism spans more than a decade in finance, business and politics. Now an experienced editor and reporter in all elements of the financial services sector, before joining Momentum Media, Maya reported for several established news outlets in South East Europe, looking at key processes in post-conflict societies.