2 Central bank digital currencies: ongoing policy perspectives
Key messages
Development of CBDC work requires careful consideration and
engagement with a wide range of stakeholders, including the private sector
and legislators.
The experiences of this group indicate that no single form of outreach or engagement
fits all purposes or all stakeholders. Two-way public outreach on CBDCs may take
different forms (eg bilateral engagement, forums, open consultations) and will need
to engage a variety of stakeholder groups. Bilateral exchanges can be used both to
create awareness and understanding, and to gather input from stakeholders.
Established forums can also serve to update stakeholders and develop practical
insights. Open consultations may also be useful for seeking views from a broader
range of industry professionals and the wider public (see Box 1).
Private innovation is seen as an important factor for the long-term success of any
CBDC. Depending on jurisdictional circumstances, central banks may choose to take
different approaches in shaping and guiding private sector propositions for possible
CBDC services and use cases. Some may favour a model where the central bank clearly
defines a scope and practical use case, whereas other central banks might favour
allowing the private sector to innovate within a set of principles and objectives.
Legislators and authorities will need to remain engaged as work on CBDC
progresses. The development of solutions to some of the outstanding legal issues
related to CBDC will largely be a matter of national law and will tend to be highly
dependent on policy choices and the design of a CBDC (see Box 2). The central banks
in this group recognise that no meaningful retail CBDC could be issued without the
support of respective governments.
To successfully meet its public policy objectives, a CBDC ecosystem
should allow a wide range of private and public stakeholders to
participate and, in doing so, deliver services which benefit end users.
The central banks contributing to this report anticipate that any CBDC ecosystem
would involve both the public and private sector. There are a variety of potential CBDC
business models, and central banks may need to understand potential benefits to
stakeholders and the public in each model, including incentives to participants and
value added to end users. They may also need to consider the optimum level of
adoption needed to meet their public policy objectives; for example, certain policy
objectives may only be achieved if CBDC adoption reaches, or exceeds, a certain level.
This may, in turn, influence the functionality, solution design and use cases for CBDC.
Central banks already have expertise in creating and managing a sophisticated
value chain for a mass market retail product – banknotes. While the value chain for
CBDC would be different, some of the expertise in banknotes may be applicable. The
range of digital products and solutions available today provide the central bank with
various options in building the ecosystem: when designing a CBDC system, central
banks could consider which services to procure from the private sector and which
services will require internal development; these decisions would be tailored to