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At EBA Day 2021, biggest and most important European Banking Conference, the new buzz word from banking CBDC could not be missed.
Lately there is lots of talk and also lots of state propaganda about this subject CBDC = Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Lots of talk from “influencers” that are marginal in the banking world but make a lot of noise in the social media.
For this reason this panel that had some heavy weights from the banking world was a must see, in order to get real information from within the European banking scene about CBDCs.
The conclusions that I got from the panel are:
- CBDCs are not really necessary in Europe for regional cross border transfers. Europe has the European Instant Payments (TIPS) and all the other cross European payment systems that makes it very easy and cheap to move money across Europe.
- Europeans are very much concerned about privacy, and CBDCs have too much tracking and audit linked to them to not be a concern. Balance between CBDCs and GDPR will be very very hard to be established.
- EU is a democratic institution and is not something vital to its survival to be able to track and spy all the financial transactions of its citizens like other regimes from Asia.
- CBDCs are going to be inevitable. The question is when they will come not if they will come.