UAE, Saudi Arabia Issue Report on ‘Aber’ Project

UAE, Saudi Arabia Issue Report on ‘Aber’ Project

Aber is a novel initiative which is considered one of the first of its kind internationally at the level of central banks.

This initiative aims to proof of concept for, study, understand, and evaluate the feasibility of issuing a digital currency for central banks, Wholesale CBDC, with a view to developing cross-border payment systems and reducing transfer times and costs between banks, in addition to experiment the direct use and actual application of technologies such as the distributed ledgers, reported state news agency Wam.

The Wholesale CBDC which was fully covered was issued by SAMA and the CBUAE, used only by them, and the banks participating in the initiative, as a settlement unit for domestic as well as cross-border commercial bank transactions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Over the course of a whole year, usage solutions were designed, implemented, and managed.

The solutions, results, and main lessons learned were all documented in Project "Aber" Report. With the project outputs, the report aims to significantly enrich knowledge content in this field, in addition to laying the foundations for future work to be explored in the coming years, stated the report.