China’s digital yuan needs to beat Alipay, WeChat Pay before challenging dollar, researcher says

China’s digital yuan needs to beat Alipay, WeChat Pay before challenging dollar, researcher says

China's digital yuan will need to dethrone the country's domestic e-payments giants first, before it can think of competing against the greenback internationally, says the Peterson Institute for International Economics' Martin Chorzempa."A lot of people talk about (the digital yuan) being a driver of renminbi internationalization," Chorzempa, senior fellow at PIIE, told CNBC's "Street Signs Asia" on Wednesday. "I think they have to beat Alipay and WeChat Pay in China before, I think, that they can make a dent in the U.S. dollar.""It's going to be essentially the central bank versus the big tech companies and that's going to be quite interesting to watch," he said.

Chorzempa said one of the main reasons spurring the push for the digital yuan was the desire for a state backed and controlled alternative to incumbent giants such as the Alibaba-affiliated Alipay app and Tencent's Wechat Pay, which currently process about 95% of digital payments in China.Unlike most other major economies globally, mobile payments “” largely through the Alipay app and Wechat Pay “” has displaced cash in the last few years as the predominant form of consumer payment in China."(The digital yuan) is something that's really unprecedented among the major economies," Chorzempa said. "China