Nirmala Sitharaman at the IMF spring meet on Monday (Image: Twitter)
The biggest risk for all countries across the board will be the aspect of money laundering and that of such currency being used for financing terror, Sitharaman said at an IMF seminar
India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday (US time) said the biggest threat cryptocurrencies pose is its potential to aid to terror financing and the digital coin can also be used for money laundering. The finance minister was addressing a seminar at the ongoing spring meet of the International Monetary Fund, or IMF. During a discussion, Sitharaman also highlighted how India’s startup ecosystem has bloomed in the last few years. The finance minister is on a visit to the United States to attend a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors (FMCBG) as well.
“The biggest risk for all countries across the board will be the aspect of money laundering and that of such currency being used for financing terror,” Sitharaman said while speaking at the seminar during the ongoing spring meet of the IMF.
“I think regulation using technology is the only answer. Regulation using technology will have to be so adept, that it has to be not behind the curve, but be sure that it is on the top of it. And that’s not possible. If any one country thinks that it can handle it. It has to be across the board,” said Sitharaman during her address.
The finance minister reached Washington on Monday to attend the meetings. She also participated in a high-level panel discussion on “Money at a Crossroad” that was hosted by IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva. “We are at the crossroads around how fast, how far, and in what proportion, but I see this as a one way street in which Digital Money is going to play a bigger role,” she said during her opening remarks.
“We as a government have spent a lot of time in the last decade to try to build the digital infrastructure framework within which we ensured that we had brought in data security to data privacy elements, and also created the ‘IndiaStack’,” Sitharaman said, adding that this helped them create Aadhaar, GST platform and the UPI.
The finance minister further said highlighted the government’s role in creating a digital infrastructure for India over the last decade and stressed on India’s use of the digital technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“If I use 2019 data, the digital adoption rate in India is about 85 per cent. But globally that same year it was only somewhere near 64 per cent. So the pandemic time actually helped us to test and prove for ourselves that it is simple to use, common people can use it, and adoption actually was proven,” Sitharaman said.
The finance minister on the day also attended an event at the Atlantic Council, a think tank based in Washington DC. She is further slated to will take part in bilateral meetings with several countries, including Indonesia, South Korea, Sri Lanka and South Africa.
Read all the Latest Business News and Breaking News here
