Central Bank Digital Currency Round-Up

BIS – Putting a Big Idea into Practice

Augustin Carstens, General Manager at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), made a speech at the end of March considering progress with CBDCs. He explained how the simpler payment process with CBDCs reduced risks, costs and time while addressing the weaknesses of today’s payment system - high credit card and cross border payment fees, a lack of universal access to digital payment tools and weak governance frameworks on big tech and other providers’ use of transaction data.

Despite these strengths, he does not believe the CBDC share of payments would be very different from that of cash. Carstens argued that the existence of CBDCs should put pressure on other means of payment to perform better, even if their market size is small.