CBDC in Latin America : Lessons and Insights on Involving Retail Payments to Financial Inclusion Strategies

The paper highlights pro and cons of introducing retail central bank digital currencies (CBDC) in Latin America to expect their potential use for retail payments, during and after their potential implementation into national financial inclusion strategies.Informing these efforts we explore operated programs and recently launched pilots in these jurisdictions – Dinero Electrónico of the Banco Central del Ecuador, e-Peso of the Banco Central del Eruguay, Sand Dollar of Central Bank of the Bahamas and Dcash of Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. Insofar all that CBDC were designed to allow citizens to reducing the need for the central bank to hold and distribute large quantities of USD notes we discuss lessons learned, including limitation and opposition from private banks.With the aim of finding key drivers of increasing financial inclusion by usage of CBDC to transfer physical cash balances in real-time we follow time line of national financial inclusion strategies implementation, despite or due to the effects from CBDC programs on financial inclusion metrics. This makes it also necessary to see how CBDC change the retail payment market that is certainly implying an opportunity to further study the subject