The services offered have so far been restricted to basic retail payments and money storage services; money can be transferred from one customer to another and it can also be stored in a customer’s virtual account. The main regulatory concern of the BOU has been to safeguard customers’ virtual money which they purchase, with cash, from mobile money agents.
But with the onset of the financial crisis, coverage was far less than adequate. In New Zealand, in 2010, the central bank introduced two liquidity ratios to increase banks’ liquidity buffers and a core funding ratio to ensure banks were holding a higher percentage of more stable liabilities such as retail deposits and wholesale loans maturing in more than a year.