Niamh Curran, Finextra reporter, took to the stage to question Faisal Islam, fintech/regtech specialist at Sentinels; Anders Olofsson, head of payments at Finastra; and Ville Sointu, head of emerging technology at Nordea about digital currencies and whether they will have the capacity to transform payment systems and how cash is used.
With the definition of a CBDC still being unclear to many, Curran asked Sointu to provide his perspective and he highlighted how for a central bank, the liability is equivalent to cash, but it is simply digital. “Beyond that, everybody has a different opinion on different perspectives of what it is, what it should be, how it is, what it’s going to be used for, whether it’s useful or not, how it’s distributed and how the service works,” Sointu added.
Olofsson agreed and continued to say that “the architecture and the design of each CBDC is very different,” and the major benefits lie beyond meeting the transparency, cost, usability, and access to monetary systems. Further, “the true benefit is way beyond that, and that is to engage the entire ecosystem around banking.”
Islam believes these are all valid points. He added: “For the most part, CBDC is really a central bank’s last effort to be able to differentiate itself from private money and private enterprises that are overtaking consumer behaviour.” Referencing Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s trial called Project Amber, Islam went on to say that like most fintech initiatives, “when it goes to alpha, you always look at all the positives and minimise the disastrous potential as much as possible.”
Further to this, he made a crucial point. “It highlights something else, which is there’s a big effort to obviously digitise central bank currencies, mainly because it essentially provides a much better outcome than banknote production. However, central banks have never actually opined that banknotes should be out of circulation. I don’t know where that came from. There isn’t a single central bank out there that has said they will stop issuing banknotes.”
A pitfall that Islam also identified was around the design of CBDCs and with digital currencies having a ledger, he reiterated that there must be an operating system behind it that is compatible across various agencies. Alongside this, the operating system itself must be robust in terms of security and manageability, and of course, interoperable.