The president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, said today that next October the regulatory body will decide whether to start the process of developing the digital euro.
Lagarde recalled at a conference on innovation that the last two years the ECB “has explored and investigated options”.
This research phase began in October 2021 and it will last about two yearsuntil October 2023.
The ECB has so far examined what the digital euro design and how it could be distributed, as well as the impact it could have on the market.
In October it will decide whether to start the process of effective development of the digital euro and you have yet to decide whether to implement it.
Lagarde assured that decreases the use of cash and digital payments increase, a trend that intensified after the covid-19 pandemic.
Cash Alternative
He digital euro would be “universal, an alternative to cashavailable to everyone, no need to have a bank accountat any time and in any place,” added the ECB president at the conference that the BIS held at its headquarters in the Swiss city of Basel and which was also broadcast online.
He digital euro I wouldn’t have either costs for most basic payments.
Likewise, Lagarde said that “privacy worries people” and that the ECB has no interest in using customer data unlike the big tech companies, which do.
However, Lagarde considered that “the digital money is not going to be so private like cash” and is therefore an alternative to cash.
