People in the Bahamas now have the option of loading the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) onto a prepaid Mastercard to enable use anywhere in the world, the payments giant has announced.
* The Bahamas Sand Dollar, the world's first CBDC, can now be converted into traditional Bahamian dollars using a prepaid Mastercard, enabling users to pay for goods and services wherever Mastercard is accepted worldwide.
* Since deployment in October 2020, the Sand Dollar has been accessed exclusively through a digital app at select merchants.
* The CBDC aims to spur financial inclusion by addressing the expense and difficulty of moving cash between the Bahamas' 700 small islands.
* The Mastercard development will also open the Sand Dollar to more users, as it has previously only been available to individuals and businesses domiciled in the Bahamas.
* The Sand Dollar carries the same value as the Bahamian dollar, itself pegged to the U.S. dollar.
“This last is important. Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. As in government bureaucracies, the easiest way to deal with such people is often to “kick them upstairs”: promote them to a higher post, where they become somebody else’s problem.”