Digital euro will protect consumer privacy, ECB executive pledges

The introduction of a digital euro would boost consumers’ privacy and protect the eurozone from the “threat” of competing cryptocurrencies that could undermine the bloc’s monetary sovereignty, according to the central banker overseeing its development.

Fabio Panetta, an executive board member at the European Central Bank, told the Financial Times that one of the project’s key aims was to combat the spread of digital coins created by other nations and companies.

“If the central bank gets involved in digital payments, privacy is going to be better protected . . . because we are not like private companies,” he said. “We have no commercial interest in storing, managing, let alone abusing, data of users.”

“Of course there is the potential threat that could come from others issuing a digital means of payment . . . If people do want to pay digitally and we do not offer them a digital means of payment, somebody [else] would do that.”

He contrasted the digital euro — an electronic version of cash issued by the central bank — with “unstable coins” such as Diem, Facebook’s planned digital currency which would let users send money as easily as text messages.

The ECB’s recent consultation on a digital euro found that people’s greatest concern was that it would erode their privacy. But Panetta said the central bank had tested ways to separate people’s identities from their payment details. “The payment will go through, but nobody in the payment chain would have access to all the information,” he said. 

The central bank has also tested “offline payments for small amounts, in which no data is recorded outside the wallets of payer and payee”, he said; transfers of up to €70 or €100 could be done using a Bluetooth link between devices. 

“For very small amounts, we could permit really anonymous payments, but in general, confidentiality and privacy are different from anonymity,” Panetta said, adding that some checks would be needed on most transactions to avoid money laundering, terrorism finance or tax evasion.

“A payment can be reconstructed [after the event] if the police want to assess whether there’s been any illicit activity,” he said.

Nearly two-thirds of the world’s central banks are running practical experiments on whether to launch digital currencies, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

But commercial banks worry that central bank digital currencies could erode their deposits, especially in a crisis. Morgan Stanley estimated as much as €837bn, or 8 per cent of eurozone bank deposits, could switch to digital euros.

It could also crowd out cash, some critics have argued; more than half of German households surveyed recently by the Bundesbank expressed scepticism about a digital euro and frequent cash users were the most dubious.

Panetta said a digital euro would lead to “a fundamental change in the way in which payments, the financial system and society at large will function”, for example by being “programmable” to allow automated payments, such as road tolls or in a cinema.

But he said the ECB was determined to make sure the digital euro did not undermine the commercial banking system, replace cash, crowd out innovation or become a shadow currency in smaller countries.

To achieve this, it is planning to either cap the amount anyone can hold at €3,000 each or impose “disincentivising remuneration” above that threshold, Panetta said.

The ECB’s governing council will meet next month to decide whether to push ahead with the preparations and Panetta said it could be ready for use in about five years’ time. 

The central bank will also complete its new oversight framework for private digital currencies and crypto asset providers by the end of this year, he said.

Crypto assets such as bitcoin are “very dangerous animals” that are “largely used for criminal activities” and consume “a huge amount of energy”, Panetta warned. 

So-called stablecoins such as Diem are meant to be safer as they are backed by fiat currency reserves, but Panetta said the potential volatility of those reserves created “an inherent instability in the function of these coins — and for this reason they are still unstable coins”.

Regulating and supervising crypto assets is hard “because there is no responsible legal entity,” he said. “It is decentralised. They could be in China. They could be in Switzerland or in South America . . . But to the extent that intermediaries are involved in the supply of those crypto assets, then we would have regulation and oversight in place.”

The digital euro should be made available in limited amounts for tourists visiting Europe, Panetta said, but the ECB would “have to reflect very carefully on access, and up to which limit, for foreign users”. 

Major central banks are in talks to ensure their digital currencies are kept “interoperable”, Panetta said, as this would help to “make cross-border payments more efficient and much cheaper”.