Central banks are exploring CBDCs because they offer several advantages, including increasing financial inclusion by making money easier and safer to access, supporting competition in payments systems, bolstering resilience against disruptions, and making implementing monetary and fiscal policy easier. They can either be account or token-based.
Banks should take measures to enhance existing products and services to meet the needs of CBDCs, including new decision-making processes and abilities in change management.
Why Central Banks Are Exploring Digital Currencies
CBDCs can be issued for various reasons in different countries; among the most prevalent are financial inclusion by providing those without bank accounts with access to payments; increasing efficiency in payments by decreasing transaction costs; creating programmable money that can help implement monetary policy effectively, and facilitating low-cost cross-border transfers.
CBDCs may use blockchain technology and provide a secure, quick way to transfer funds quickly to unbanked individuals or small businesses in the United States. They may also act as digital cash that helps companies reduce fees to payment networks (although that may not apply if they are token-based rather than account-based).
Central banks will benefit most from creating a CBDC because it will centralize ownership records rather than leaving them scattered among various institutions as they currently are, thus lowering maintenance costs and speeding up money circulation in the economy.
Benefits of CBDCs for Central Banks
Central banks have long prioritized supporting low costs, financial inclusion, privacy protection and innovation when it comes to retail payments. CBDCs could assist central banks in meeting these goals by offering secure digital central bank money that could be used both online and offline.
Digital CBDCs may help reduce transaction costs by eliminating serial numbers and providing faster and cheaper payment processes, including interbank transfers. They may also deter illegal activities by enabling central banks to track money within their jurisdiction.
Design of CBDCs should be determined by the specific objectives and adoption goals pursued by a central bank, including identifying and quantifying as much risk associated with experimentation before creating a strategy to manage them. McKinsey suggests that central banks create a clear policy framework for exploring CBDCs as well as success measures for measuring success.
Regulatory Issues
Establishing, experimenting with, regulating and overseeing CBDCs require considerable work from central banks. They should take the necessary time and care in building trust among various constituencies by communicating openly about potential advantages and risks of CBDCs as well as technology choices used. International regulations and cooperation also play an essential part in building confidence in them.
CBDCs could play an essential role in fighting financial crime as they are traceable compared to cash transactions. Furthermore, they could strengthen payment systems’ resilience; particularly during times of economic strain or stress when people need an alternative deposit vehicle such as non-remunerated CBDCs can serve as an important bulwark against bank deposits and boost national payments system confidence by offering bank deposits as alternatives.
CBDCs may upend the current fractional reserve banking system by replacing commercial banks’ liquid deposit claims with narrowly defined central-bank digital assets, shifting financial instability risk away from private banks to the central bank and making banking systems more transparent and efficient by eliminating intermediary roles for loanable funds and helping the central bank prevent bank runs.
Challenges of CBDCs
As cash becomes less prevalent worldwide, more central banks are exploring digital currencies as a potential means of increasing programmability of money; reducing payment costs; providing greater resilience within payment systems and providing easier access to financial services.
CBDCs provide infrastructure for digital financial services, such as peer-to-peer transfers and remittances, while also lowering barriers to entry for new digital finance providers. They may also facilitate various government functions, including tax collection and distribution of welfare payments.
However, digital transactions present their own set of unique challenges. Since digital transactions are difficult to track and difficult to conceal, providing opportunities for criminal activity. CBDCs could help address this by enabling central banks to monitor all transactions while helping intermediaries identify suspicious ones; however this requires design decisions about how the system is organized as well as an openness towards working closely with private sector players.
