The European Central Bank recently published its forth progress report on the investigation phase of a digital euro. It aggregated the Eurosystem’s views on principles for a compensation model, updates on ongoing work and the results of the prototyping expertise as well as the conducted market research.
Key insights:
1️⃣ Basic services for citizens on the digital euro should be free of charge
2️⃣ Intermediaries should be compensated for the services they provide
3️⃣ ECB’s market research finds that there is a sufficiently large pool of European providers, who could develop digital euro solutions.
4️⃣The recently established Scheme Rulebook Working Group has focused on digital euro use cases and user journeys. The first work stream explores scheme compatibility to leverage existing infrastructures and solutions. The second work streams deals with customer identification and authentication.
5️⃣ The ECB welcomes the legislative proposal on the digital euro by the European Commission and will provide its opinion after the summer.
6️⃣ If the digital euro will be introduced one day, it will follow a staggered roll-out of priority use cases. First, person to person payments and e-commercial payments. Second, physical store (POS) payments.
All recommendations by the Eurosystem on the digital euro design are currently reviewed and will feed into the conclusions of the investigation phase. It will be used to inform the Governance Council in its decision – expected in autumn – on potentially entering the development phase of the digital euro.