EBAday 2024: Challenges and benefits of CBDCs

finextra.com:

In the panel session ‘Challenges and benefits of CBDCs, tokenised deposits, and stablecoin adoption’, speakers David Cunningham, head of strategy and partnerships for digital assets, treasury, and trade solutions at Citi; Manuel Klein, market management payments and digital currencies, cash management at Deutsche Bank; Alessandro Roveda, head of network services solutions at Nexi Group; Gilbert Verdian, founder and CEO of Quant; and Phoebe Zhou, head of emerging payments, GPS Europe at HSBC, discussed how various countries manage public and private money.

Cunningham started off the session by explaining Citi’s approach to CBDC initiatives: “These industry issues are important for us to figure out; how we get our standards together takes time. It's important to get those things right much like David Birch said earlier. We don't need details on CBDCs tomorrow, but we need to get it right. What we are concerned with at Citi is that as we regulate for CBDCs, stablecoins, and other things, what will be the effect on commercial earnings and on our business model?”

Klein said that Deutsche Bank has been looking into blockchain capabilities and is highly involved in the Digital Euro project that has entered another phase in its development. He continued that there is a heavy focus on new developments with blockchain technologies, and creating transactions with more programmability.

Verdian stated that Quant works across central bank issuing retail CBDC, and issuing tokenised deposits and making all forms of money interoperable. Mentioning a project that they worked on, Project Rosalind, he highlighted that the main takeaway was programmability.

“It came down to programmability. Running payments electronically can do two things: