PARIS (Reuters) – The european central Bank needs to accelerate if it wants to be the first to issue a currency digital central bank (MDBC), said on Wednesday François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the Bank of France.
The u.s. federal Reserve and other central banks have started work on the subject, but it is for the time being, the Bank of China, which is the most advanced.
“I see a definite interest to move quickly on the issue, at least, an MDBC wholesale to be the first issuer on the international level and reap the benefits reserved to a MDBC reference”, stressed François Villeroy de Galhau at a conference organised in Paris.
The Bank of France is willing to participate to experiments of integration of a MDBC “wholesale” in the procedures for the exchange and settlement of financial assets tokenisés and a call for projects will be launched by the end of the first quarter of 2020, he added.
“Our action will contribute naturally to that of the Eurosystem with the study of a possible “e-” euro ” should be one of the next subjects.”
Concerned by the rise of projects such as the Libra Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), central banks and governments strive to take back the hand, fearing that States and supranational organizations lose control of the currencies.
At the same time, the emergence of contactless payment and growth of purchasing at a distance has facilitated the use of money, cloud-based, by individuals and businesses.
Some european banks are working on the design of a solution to pan-european payments in the framework of the project PEPS-I (Pan European Payment Solution Initiative), that could prove to be a major step forward to help european banks meet the challenges posed by the BigTechs,” said François Villeroy de Galhau.
(Leigh Thomas, French version Nicolas Delame, edited by Jean-Michel Belot)
