Local press reported that Peru’s Credit Bank (BCP) has completed crypto-based payments for the first bank shaping in Peru. Employees used bank-issued tokens to purchase coffee from internal coffee shops as part of the pilot of these technologies.
Peru debuts cryptocurrency payments at banks
As technology is becoming ubiquitous in the payments field, more countries are immersing their toes in code. Peru is one of these countries, and Peru’s Credit Bank (BCP) recently brokered its first cryptocurrency-based payments on internal pilots.
Bank employees used tokens to pay for coffee at the bank’s cafeteria. Tokens, which are gifts of names, are limited to these types of uses and cannot be sold or commercialized. Gifts and payments were issued using a polygon network.
Commenting on the relevance of this movement, Lenin Carrillo, BCP’s blockchain and crypto leader:
What we did on Friday was probably the first cryptocurrency payments made by a Peruvian bank. It paves the way for people to set precedents and start challenging existing service models.
The pilot is designed to avoid exposure to market volatility and disadvantages. Instead, the agency sought to explore the frictional users they experience when dealing with these technologies for the first time.
“I don’t know anything about cryptocurrency, but I wanted to understand how difficult it is for people who are familiar with digital wallets, how difficult it is for people who may encounter when downloading wallets, adding tokens and using them. Everything is provided by the bank and there is no financial risk to the users.”
To this end, complexity was extracted and payments were accelerated using QR codes. FireBlocks, a tool for Digital Assets Management, handles backend tasks and internal plumbing and completes operations.
Carrillo stressed that although it is not yet regulated, the bank is investigating actual use cases for the technology. These include cross-border payments and remittances, so once regulations are issued, banks are ready to implement digital assets in these use cases.
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