Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's seminar at Digital Euro for Everyone. My name is Ronan Sheridan and I am delighted to be your moderator today. Ever since we launched the Digital Euro project, the ECB has been identifying the appropriate design options to provide Europeans with a stable, safe and convenient digital currency. In October this year, the Government Council of the European Central Bank will decide whether to move on to the next phase of the project. And as we approach this date, we're working together with a variety of stakeholders to deliver new findings. It's important to us to regularly engage with you as representatives of civil society to both understand your views on the Digital Euro and also to provide a progress update and to share with you future plans. So it's our pleasure to be here with you once again to discuss all things Digital Euro. Now just a couple of housekeeping rules before we get started. Please keep your microphones muted unless you're speaking. We encourage you to turn on your cameras even when you're not speaking as we hope this will enrich the debate and make for a more interactive environment. Please be aware that this seminar is being recorded and will be published on our ECB website in the coming days. And finally, if you have technical problems, please just type host in the chat box and a member of our team will assist you right away. So now to our panel of speakers. Eveline Whitlocks here on my right is leading the Digital Euro project at the ECB and Ignacio Terral is the product manager of the Digital Euro project. The presentation today will be split into two parts. And after each part there will be a Q&A session. So firstly, the focus will be on the need to have a Digital Euro under the recent legislative proposal. And the second part of the presentation will then focus on the agreed design and plan for the Digital Euro project. So now with that I leave the floor over to you. Eveline. Thank you very much, Ronan. And thank you very much for those joining today. It's a pleasure to interact with you on the Digital Euro. So today I will first talk on two topics, which is briefly on the legislative proposal that has just been published. And then on more the why of the Digital Euro, we have discussed this more often, but we feel this is still important to exchange views on. Then there is room for questions after that. And then later we will, Nacho will talk on the what. So on the legislative framework. So in a nutshell. So what we have seen is that there are changing payment behaviors and declining use of cash and an increasing usage of payment solutions. So if you look to the legislative proposal, we see that the objective is to ensure citizens and businesses access to central bank money in a digital age. And therefore there is this proposal, which is a draft published by the European Commission on the 28th of June, which would be a legislative framework for a retail Digital Euro. So if we look to this proposal, we of course from the ECB, we really welcome this proposal. If you can see on the slide our board member Fabio Permaneta has said that this is key to ensure that the Digital Euro brings value to the people taking the appreciated value features of cash into the digital age. And if we look to the proposal, we find a couple of points very important. First of all, that it gives a legal tender status across the Euro area. And with that we can ensure that like banknotes the Digital Euro will be accessible and usable throughout the Euro area for all citizens. We also see that the legislative proposal supports a high degree of privacy while it minimizes the money laundering and terrorist financing risks. It also states that the basic services should be free of charge and that there should be appropriate economic incentives for intermediaries to distribute it. And this is important so that we can ensure that the Digital Euro users are served well, of course, by their intermediaries. The legislative proposal also says that there should be an online and an offline variant of the Digital Euro, which we have been discussing for a longer time already. And last but not least, it foresees that there will be holding limits, which will make sure that we maintain a good balance between on one side bank deposits and on the other side central bank money. Questions we get a lot is how can on one side there be still the legislative proposal on the table and on the other side there is the governing council decision potentially to move to a next stage in autumn of this year. A couple of things that we want to stress again is that a decision to issue will only be taken by the governing council once the Digital Euro legislation is adopted. What we will do in parallel, and that will be the proposal that will go to the governing council, is that we will further prepare an experiment to be as ready as possible for a potential next phase. And of course throughout the process we will keep a close eye on how the legislative proposal and the legislation in the end will develop to make sure that when we decide to issue a Digital Euro that it will be of course fully in line with the legislation. So let me now turn to an important element of the debate on the Digital Euro and is why would we need a Digital Euro? So there are three items and reasons that we keep highlighting which are the main reasons for the ECB, the Euro system to contemplate to issue a Digital Euro. First, and I touched upon that already briefly, there is the evolution of money. What we see is that there is a decline in the usage of cash and that people have far bigger appreciation of digital payments. So more and more payments we do digitally and also when asked people give a preference for digital payments. So we need to make sure that we have a public money that will continue to support the citizens. We also see that it would make your life easier and that has more to do with the wide usability and accessibility through the Euro area, but I will go a little bit deeper in the next slides. And then last but not least, we believe that the Digital Euro will increase the resilience of the Euro area. So let me now zoom in on the first one, which is the evolution of money. And we believe that cash and a Digital Euro should be stronger together. So what we see, as I explained before, that there is a preference for paying digitally. However, we also notice and have taken note that people really like the option of cash to be there. So we also stay committed to cash. And we might come back to that at the end of this presentation. So what we believe is that also a Digital Euro could as a public good preserve the valued characteristics of cash. So it will not be one-on-one the same as cash because it's a different environment, but some valued characteristics we think we can bring to the Digital Age.  We share the same currency and a Euro is a Euro also when we pay digitally. And that currently is not always the case. And that brings me to the other element that we say making your life easy. So the Digital Euro will not be mandatory. It will be an option for the payer. But what we want to make sure that this option stays there. So we have this option now in the current world so you can pay either with money provided by commercial parties or you pay with cash, which is a central bank money. And we believe going to the Digital Age it's important that this option will be there. We believe that with the Digital Euro we can make the life of people easier because the Digital Euro will be always accessible and always accepted. And it will be the only single European digital means of payments that will be accepted throughout the Euro area. You might all recall experiences where you could either not pay with your digital means or payment and that you had to refer to other solutions. And very important, this option will be free for basic use like it is with cash. Then last but not least, the resilience of the Euro area. We believe a Digital Euro will be reliable money no matter what. And with the Digital Euro we believe we can increase the resilience. Everyday payments are an essential service for people and the well-functioning of the economy. You never think about whether you can pay or not because you trust that you can pay. But maybe you can remember electricity outages or any other kind of problems where you could not pay. Very quickly this becomes very inconvenient for yourself and for the economy as a whole. Another point is that the Euro system will make sure that nobody is left behind. So since the Digital Euro will be public good we will be committed to make sure that everybody can move to a digital age and can pay there with the right to privacy maintained. And then last but not least, currently Europe is depending highly on external providers for digital payments. And we believe it's important that we have a pan-European solution for Europe. And then in short, let me summarize some value added of the Digital Euro. So first, and I mentioned it before, we would foresee that there would be offline payments that would be possible. We also will strive to make more digital and financial inclusion and also the legislation will support that. We will build the Digital Euro to make sure that there will be easier and faster online payments. As I said before, privacy is extremely important so we will make sure that we have the highest level of privacy that we can provide. And mainly with offline we think we can provide really a level of privacy which is close to the level of privacy with cash. We believe that with having a public good into the system it will maintain a right equilibrium and making sure since payments is a network product that there is sufficient competition so that this will make sure that there are cheap, efficient digital payments for merchants and if they are there for merchants it in the end always pays back for the consumers. And last but not least, you will be always able to pay when you travel. And with that I would like to close for now and hand back to Ronan for questions. Thank you very much, Eveline. Indeed a lot of information there so hopefully you have some questions that you would like to share or points you would like to make and share with Eveline and Ignatio. So maybe what we will do is we will take your questions maybe together and then Eveline can address them. So if anyone has a first question they would like to raise please just raise your virtual hand and then we would ask you to maybe just mention what organization you are coming from as well so that we can address you directly as well. So yeah as I say we have a lot of a good number of people on the call today so really it would be really nice if we start to get the questions and then we can pull them as I say and then put them to Eveline. So I think that both those hands went up almost exactly at the same time so maybe from top down so I see one from Adela Dalla-Costa perhaps you could unmute please and ask your question. Hi yes I'm Adela Dalla-Costa from Positive Money Europe. First of all thanks a lot for organizing this seminar it's always very much appreciated. I have a question concerning the holding limits to the digital euro account so in the commission proposal Adela has allocated to the ECB the task of establishing a holding limit for financial stability purposes so my question would be how are you going to determine this this limit are you going to like is it going to be a research-based kind of decision and so far we were not aware of any research indicating any risk of financial stability due to no holding limits for digital euros so I was wondering if as part of your research are you also going to explore a holding limit for digital euros to consider in your final decision thanks. Thanks Adela thank you very much we also have a question then from Rens van Tilburg Rens please go ahead Yes thank you very much and thank you for organizing this call I'm from the sustainable finance lab from the Netherlands and I have a roughly similar question the easy question would be you refer that there should be a good balance between deposit and digital euro so what criteria are you thinking about to decide what is good in that sense and a more specific question is do you have a static or a dynamic view on that in the sense that if there is a financial crisis or the fear of a financial crisis would then that balance shift which I think with looking at consumer preferences it does so there will be a push then to if there is a certain limit and if that limit is not very high from people to have more digital euros how do you would like to go about with that and I would say the background for my question is that with the sustainable finance lab we have actually made an analysis in 2018 where we said it would actually be good if we would have something which is also a store of value digitally with the central bank actually as an incentive for commercial banks to finance themselves in a more stable way so that it would actually in a dynamic way be financial stability and housing but of course there is a transition question here and would it as we would say like you should in the end have a rather a high limit but grow towards that gradually and what we think is sort of like the worst overall so you can have is that you have a very low limit which then is increased in times of stress all of a sudden so very curious how you would look at that thank you thank you very much so any additional questions that's too so far any more questions people would like to ask in this round great Tristan please ask your question yes thank you very much I'm Tristan Dissaut from the University of Brussels and Fabienne Institute my question concerns the offline version of the digital euro could you say a bit more about it as the most inclusive and most privacy enhancing offline digital euro would be a non-identified digital euro so a true bearer instrument in the same way as you don't need to be identified to use cash and to hold cash so would this offline digital euro offer the same the same qualities of cash in terms of not needing to be identified to to use it thank you thank you very much so any additional questions before we hand over to Eberlin one more Rens a new one go ahead yes if time allows then I have because it is a bit of a burning question with me as I said we've been working on the idea of digital euro since 2018 and there was not much enthusiasm for that at that time from central banks which of course really changed the moment that Facebook came with the Libra idea which I think shows to an extent that the real reason why we're talking about the digital euro is the fear at that moment that somehow the payment system would would be controlled by other organizations than commercial banks or the central bank but what actually commercial organizations from outside of the eurozone and that is something that I don't see back in any of the I don't think so in any of the reasons that we've just been listed as to why we have a digital euro and I've been in the Netherlands I've been a lot on the in the conversations in the Dutch media of the last couple of weeks as to why do we need a digital euro and in the Netherlands where we have a good electronic payment system a lot of people are saying why do we actually need this because we have all the pros that the ECB just listed we already have them in the Netherlands and I've been trying to sort of like bring to the table that there's actually a really big problem if we would all need to be paying with Facebook coins so to say but the fact that the ECB is not putting that as a reason to see reasons on the table I think it makes it harder also to well to make the case for the digital euro in a quite digitalized financial environment like the Netherlands so yeah my question how do you look at this reason and is this something that the ECB could communicate as well thank you Great well Reims thanks very much for that so I'm conscious as well of balancing that we have enough time to address the questions we've gained as well so perhaps with that I'll hand over to Evelyn I think somebody needs to mute again perhaps thank you Thank you very much, thank you for the questions and your interest let me start with the questions around the holding limits so a couple of questions were asked so first on how will you determine this holding limit and has any research been done so first of all some research has been done already so we have been going out on on the basis of some research that we have done that we believe that with a holding limit of around 3.000 euros there would be no impact or concern for financial stability having said that we have always said and we will keep saying that that the holding limit will be decided only much closer to issues because then we can take much better into account the economic situation at that point in time that would also entail that if the council would decide to go to a next phase that will allow us more time for further research and interaction with the market to make sure that we have also addressed some concerns around the holding limits then on the question that Rens asked on whether it's stable or dynamic the attention is that it is as stable as possible so not that we would decide every other month to change the holding limit it's really something that should be stable and the holding limit is also there just to avoid that in time of crisis there would be a big outflow of liquidity in the bank in one go so it would not be a logic conclusion to change the holding limit in a time of crisis and I just want to flag maybe not for this audience but other audience are very concerned about that is that of course with digital means of payments it's anyway relatively easy to move your money from one bank to the other so the digital euro will only marginally contribute to that risk then on the question from Christian on the offline digital euro and how it would look like Nacho will say a little bit more in the next phase part of the presentation what I can already say is that it would be indeed something like a bearer instrument which can be relatively or very private in the sense that transactions are only registered between the two devices that interact with each other it can be your mobile phone or a card what is currently not foreseen is that it's completely anonymous so this means that you need to open somewhere an account get your offline digital euro what could then be seen is the fact that you would upload digital euros to your device or that you defund it because you want it back on your account and that is very similar as what currently is there also for cash if you go to the ATM the bank knows that you have withdrawn whatever 100 euros or when you go back and you deposit 100 euros they will know but what they don't know is all the transactions that are there in between and a digital euro offline one could be technically designed exactly the same way but as said Natja will say a bit more in the next part then on the last question from Rens on the resilience sorry I already made the connection with the resilience so your argumentation indeed that we need to make sure that digital euro remains our unit of account or the euro remains our unit of account and that there is always the option for public money we are not fully dependent on commercial parties is very much one of the reasons of the resilience that we mentioned so this is about the resilience and independence from the current providers because you mentioned for example the Netherlands all the POS transactions are done on rails provided by non-European players just to make everybody aware but this also includes indeed the further development of parties like Facebook or others that could come in but also other CBDCs central bank digital currencies that could surface in the world so it is one of the argumentation and one of the reasons that we bring we bring this normally in relationship to the resilience one increasing our resilience with that I have answered the question but I see one hand raised exactly so I think we still have just two or three more minutes before we move on to the next presentation Martin Schmelzried, if you want to ask a question please go ahead Can you hear me? Yes So Martin Schmelzried from the COFSA Confederation of Family Organizations, Family Zero I just had a question clarification regarding I see a kind of a contradiction between your point about resilience and also the point about the limits on holding because I mean consumers have been denouncing the fact that there is a kind of too big to fail environment with banks and that some banks are counting on the fact that they're too big to fail and engage in risky moral hazard activities and the digital euro could actually be an instrument to actually support more responsible behavior because it wouldn't be as difficult to resolve these kind of bank failures if consumers can actually exit in case of a problem like we've seen in the US three major banks failing and many people being left completely naked without any kind of money losing all their money this is obviously I would think that a digital euro given your argument about resilience could definitely serve that kind of purpose to further stabilize the financial system and to serve as a sort of second kind of like a fallback in case there is a major kind of meltdown issue so do you foresee that kind of usage at some point and do you see that there's this kind of dual opposition between your argument about resilience and the holding limits thank you thank you for your question it's a multifaceted question I would say so let me start with the digital euro so the digital euro is mainly designed as a means of payment that doesn't mean that there is zero store of value that's why there is a holding limit but the main argumentation is a means of payment and to have a resilience related more to the payment so that's also what you see back and reflected into the design of course in the wider financial sector there are other safeguards put in place in order if something would go wrong with the bank that your deposits are secured to a certain level so we're not addressing the full of your concerns with the digital euro because as I said it's mainly designed as a means of payment with a limited store of value function sorry not sure do you want to add something yes I can compliment if you really see that the evolution of cash it's trying to preserve a very nice balance which has been existing for decades between deposits and cash in the sense that yes you can take all the money away from your bank account to have it in cash but that involves a certain if it's a significant amount of course it's a significant risk for you that you lose or that that cash is stolen so we want to preserve that balance and that balance implies that we need to factor in that risk and that cost which exists for everybody if you withdraw money from your bank account to take a significant amount of cash great thanks very much and so then let's move on to the second half of our time so the second presentation so we said at the start that our second presentation will focus on the agreed design and the plan for the digital euro project so with that we'll have a presentation from Ignatio for about 10 minutes and then we'll have a slide-off question and then we will have time for questions and answers and then we can wrap up so Ignatio over to you thank you very much Ronan the question will be actually to ask you on where you find the most valuable use case from these ones I'm presenting here so if you think about how people could use a digital euro in terms of where in terms of use cases so we see the possibility to do person to person payments to pay in physical stores and to pay in e-commerce as the day-to-day retail payments which we're all used to today we can use cash in person-to-person payments and in physical stores but not in e-commerce e-commerce is expanding so this would allow us to bring back an equilibrium in which central bank money can also be used in all fields of commerce you see here also with this sign the possibility to pay online and offline depending on the situations so of course you cannot pay offline on e-commerce just like you can't pay offline you can't pay in e-commerce with cash and we try to cover with this the diversity of needs of citizens in terms of actual form factor in terms of what you would use you could use a mobile phone or you could use a card so depending on the combinations that you see there you would be able to pay in person-to-person physical stores or in e-commerce let me take you now through how we would use digital euro accessible as a public good so the euro system would take the responsibility to issue the digital euro and since this would be the liability of the euro system it would be our ledger we would also need to take the responsibility for settling those payments supervised intermediary so payment service providers will distribute the digital euro they will manage their customer relationship as they do today so it would not be possible for anybody to go directly to the central bank just like today you don't go directly to the central bank for cash that's a customer relationship which is managed by the payment service provider according to the applicable law it would be important to have a smooth onboarding and simple access to users and for this purpose we are inviting but it's their option the various banks to provide mobile banking apps which would always which would be supporting digital euro payments in any case all banks should be supporting a new digital euro app where the app would be provided basically the underlying service is provided by each bank which is as per digital payments today validating each payment each online payment to do the necessary anti-money laundering counter-terrorism financing and fraud checks one key point that would be new with digital euro would be an easier way of providing of digital euro holdings from one provider to another today if you know this well if you change your mobile phone from one company to another you can take your mobile phone you don't need to change a mobile phone number to go from one provider to another with the I-Ban in the way in which it's designed the I-Ban includes a country code and includes a code moving from one bank to another you cannot take your I-Ban from one bank to another so we would ensure with a digital euro that easy porting so that it would not be a code which is a country or bank dependent which you could use so you would have easier flexibility to move from one payment service provider to another to provide you digital euro services let me address now Anita this graph tries to capture the online functionality and the offline functionality nicely complement each other with the online functionality as was shown in my initial slide you can cover all use cases person to person physical shops or e-commerce and offline functionality in contrast would only be available for proximity payments so you have to be in front of the person you're paying or in front of you have to be in a physical shop it would be so it's proximity and it would be as cash there would be a maximum limit set in this case by the commission just like also the maximum amounts of payments with cash are often limited so there would be in order to preserve exactly the same privacy versus AML balance which exists in cash an offline digital euro would bring this balance to the digital sphere and in that respect it would have the highest privacy level possible with the digital means of payment in so far as the payment would be taking place from one secure device in my mobile phone in my cart to the secure device which is in the hands of the payee so from that perspective just like today a payment with cash is only known to the payer and to the payee this payment with an offline digital euro would only be known to the payer and to the payee again like cash the money is in your secure device which means that if you would lose the mobile phone for example in which you have your secure device it's as if you lose your physical wallet where you hold your cash so it's really bringing replicating closer these cash features to the digital sphere to have the way cash in your mobile if I can put it in a very simple then one point where we had very valuable interactions with consumer right associations they brought us and I think to the commission as well the importance of facilitating digital inclusion not just financial inclusion but also digital inclusion if what is legal tender if what is the form of money issued by the central bank in the end the money of the union if that's brought to the digital sphere there is a consequent obligation of public authorities to facilitate that accessibility and one key point in the legislative proposal is that there will be dedicated entities in the various member states offering in-person so really face to face support for those who need help in using a digital application of course for those who would not still feel secure with a digital application the possibility to use physical cards should also be there as well as the possibility to allow funding and defunding via cash of course this accessibility we're speaking about public money so this accessibility to digital services should be facilitated free of charge and now I think we turn to Ronan for initiating. Yes, thanks Inazio thanks very much so as we mentioned a little while ago we have a slido question for you to answer Inazio already teed it up for us nicely so the question is about what is the most common use case for the digital euro that you can see or you can feel so the question should be there on the chat function and feel free to already think about answering that and then in the meantime if you already have questions that you want to raise following that presentation we'll do the same as we did for the first round we'll collect questions together so with that then perhaps then we hand over to Alexander who you have your hand raised Alexander please go ahead and ask your question Hello I'm Alexander Simic from the sustainable finance lab in the Netherlands I had two questions about the offline digital euro payments so one relates to the previous ones and that is what the limits would be to these the legislative proposal is not clear moreover it gives different powers to different entities to set these limits so offline holding limits would be set by the European Commission and online to the ECB this is not clear where this distinction comes from so I'm curious as to your explanation on this and then the second thing is of course there are no limits to holding cash and as this offline option is similar to cash as possible I'm wondering how you see setting this limit things Thank you very much so anybody and any additional questions at this point Tristan please go ahead ask your question Thank you my question concerns distribution of the digital euro and universal access to the digital euro in the European Union we already have the payment access directive which is supposed to guarantee the right to a basic payment account regardless of a personal financial situation in particular but we see that in many instances banks prevent people from accessing a back account mostly because they don't see customers as profitable enough so how could we ensure that digital euro services would be more inclusive in particular if we rely on private intermediaries as it's often emphasized in the current proposition so how can we have better results than with current provision of basic payment accounts Thank you Thank you very much so any additional questions I see Alexander you have your hand raised I assume that's not a new question thank you in case it was more than welcome to obviously ask another one Anybody else wants to ask a question at this stage and I see we have I think seven colleagues who have also responded to the slide open survey so really that's in case anyone else who wants to add their view to that please go ahead and if we don't have any additional questions then I think then we can at this point start to address the ones that we have received and of course we have still a bit of time for anyone who wants to ask any additional questions on this or anything they heard earlier as well so perhaps hand over to you Matthew Thank you for the question so Alexander on the question of the setting the limit as to what would be the maximum offline payments which is also connected to what's the maximum amount of detail you can hold offline so to clarify today with cash it's not the ECB which is setting what might be in different countries the maximum payment which can be done with cash because that entails a judgment of privacy versus anti-money laundering it's not a central bank decision it's a political decision and that's why at least in the legislative proposal it's proposed that that decision that equivalent of this maximum amount of a payment with cash that would lie with the European Commission to set it and then what is the overall holdings of digital euro because that's that's something which we do every day so the overall holding limit of a digital euro would be established by the ECB so let me take just one theoretical example what if the maximum the overall holding limit with a digital euro would be 3,000 while the maximum payment that you can do offline and therefore the maximum amount that you can hold offline would be 1,000 it would be in this case up to every user to configure within these parameters how they would like to better define depending on the use that they would want to make the use depending on the use they would make on the online of the offline how you would distribute the 3,000 so you could have you could decide to have everything just with your online you could decide to have 2,500 with the online 500 with the offline of course you would not be able to go as far as having 1,500 in the online and 1,500 with the offline because the maximum for the offline would be 1,000 so this would be a practical a practical example to reflect at least our understanding of what is brought in the legislative proposal on the question of the distribution of digital euro and universal access I think it's important to highlight in the legislative proposal that there is the obligation for every credit institution for every bank towards their customer to provide digital euro upon demand digital euro is also the all the services related all the basic services to enable their customers to use a digital euro shall be provided by banks upon demand then on top of that because then the question is so what happens for the unbanked on top of that and because there's if the form of money issued by the union becomes digital as I said there's an additional responsibility beyond what is established in the payment account directive to make this accessible to everybody in the union and that's why the legislation foresees that member states shall designate dedicated licensed entities it's what we call a public approach licensed entities to facilitate access to the digital euro for example for the unbanked of course let's say it's these entities will need to perform the necessary KY the necessary know your customer processes so there's everything which is to be done to avoid money laundering shall be established we don't want more fraud with the digital euro but there's a specific responsibility as I said for member states to designate entities in their countries to facilitate this access which is not existing in the in the path and also to facilitate the digital inclusion which I was mentioning earlier. Thank you very much for that. I see also a question from Christian Christian please go ahead and ask your question and then if we have time after that I notice from the Slido results that as well as person to person offline which I think that has already covered there was also a preference for e-commerce so perhaps we could touch on that if we still have a moment or two so Christian anyway please please go ahead and ask your question. Thank you. My question is regarding the distribution or in fact the remuneration model that's currently being proposed at first look this model seems to occupy a slightly awkward middle ground between cash on the one hand and private e-money on the other in that on the one hand it is cash like in that payment services providers are at least in the proposals prohibited from charging fees to retail customers emphasis here being on retail on the other hand it is very much similar to commercial private e-money payment services models where merchants are being charged which brings me to two questions one fundamental and one more practical the fundamental being if we are looking at the digital as the legal tender as the new electronic digital equivalent to cash it is not customary in fact to remunerate anybody for handling cash purely for the reason that it is the legal tender so why adopting a merchant fee model as opposed to effectively requiring payment services providers to handle digital euro transactions because it is the legal tender and because beyond the basic services the PADs the basic services which are not remunerated they can generate revenues from offering additional services so this is the fundamental question the practical question is although although payment service providers would not be allowed to charge fees to retail customers what is the perspective of the ECB on merchants passing on the merchant fees to retail customers would they be allowed to effectively sort of do to your price as is sort of the case with credit card payments currently and simply pass through the merchant fees thank you thank you very much, Nathaniel thank you for the good questions I think really the challenge here of the commission in the legislative proposal has been how to bring the concept of legal tender to the digital world already also in because there's been the parallel cash proposal in harmonizing the understanding of legal tender in the area so how to bring legal tender to the cash world and the basic safeguard which is established there is that on the one hand merchants who are accepting digital payments are required to accept digital euro which is what is enabling us to always have this option to pay but at the same point of time there's a safeguard there saying that merchants cannot be charged more than for comparable payment instruments so in a way with this safeguard the risk that the merchant would face higher acceptance costs because it is accepting digital euro would be in existent because it's ruled out by legislation so that fear that merchants would be having higher costs that they would pass on to consumers it's ruled out in the legislative proposal at the same time can you say merchants should not be having any acceptance costs well today with cash when merchants go to deposit of course merchants are normally getting more cash in than they have cash out so that cash in which they have they need to ultimately sooner or later deposit it in banks and that has a cost so I think again here also it's preserving a balance with also the fact that that cash has manipulation and security related costs finally also keep in mind that while in an offline digital euro that goes from secure device to secure device like cash there is no intervention of any bank of any payment service provider in an online payment banks will need to do the same fraud the same anti-money laundering checks as they are doing with other private digital payment private means digital means of payment so it's only fair also that they are reminerated in a similar way so this is this would be my my understanding of how the commission and it's a challenge to bring the concept of legal tender to the digital world it's a very delicate equilibrium and it's important to read from this perspective the legislative proposal carefully thanks very much Ignatio I mentioned earlier that if we had time we could just get any reactions from both of you either view on e-commerce being the top case but I think we stimulated enough conversation already but if you have anything to add Ignatio on that or any reaction to that or yes so I would see it in the context in which indeed cash is not today available in e-commerce so where is cash missing today that would be my reason to vote for e-commerce at the same time I'm also not surprised of the very close number of votes with offline digital euro because it's also what is more distinct to what is already existing today great thank you thank you very much for that so then we're coming to the end of our so before I wrap up maybe I just pass over to Evelyn in case you have any concluding remarks thoughts Evelyn thank you very much I will be brief just also to make sure that we stay in the timeline that was planned for but I want to thank you for your interest for these interactions we really value this very much we speak in this context we also speak some of you I've already spoken also face to face we really continue and Ronan will say a bit more but we would like for the digital euro to stay closely connected on the topics that are important for civil society in the broadest sense but for the end user because the digital euro is designed to bring value to the end users which is both the citizens as well as the merchants and it's important I believe when we are going to the next phase both in the design of the product as well as for the legislation to keep that very closely in mind that it's really for them that we're doing this so your contributions your input are very highly valued so thank you for being here with us thank you very much Evelyn so then maybe just before we finish up we do and if you remember the last sessions that we had similarly to this we would encourage you to answer a couple of questions in the feedback survey which is now or should be on your screen it really does help us to try and change how we engage a little bit to try and get as much out of this for you as we can so we really value any input there and as I say I just want to say thanks both to Evelyn and to Ignatio for the time and for their contributions and for sharing the updates that we've made and Evelyn has already thanked you indeed as well so maybe one other thing to do to take advantage of your attention at the moment we've mentioned a couple of times several times that digital euro is not meant to replace but to complement cash and we're very much committed to keeping cash available at ECB and in fact you may already be aware that we are currently working on a new design for euro banknotes in view of preventing counterfeiting and reducing environmental impact and continuing the innovation that is required for banknotes in circulation so we would invite you also to fill in our survey on our website to share your views on the seven different design themes which we are proposing as possible new themes for the banknotes design when it takes place so you can find a link in the chat and we would also be really grateful if you could share this link with your organizations as well the more views we have the better in terms of shaping the banknotes of the future so that's that then and just really to wrap up and say many thanks to everyone again we will be holding our next session our next seminar on banking supervision on the 18th of July and I think hopefully you have already received an invitation to that yesterday and we hope to see you there at that so with that I wish you all a very good evening and until next time thank you very much and goodbye


Welcome everybody to get another crisis conversation live from the better life lab live from my home office where I'm socially distancing like everyone else. And you know we created these conversations to create space for all of us to come together to try to understand as fast moving crazy crisis that's really upending how we work and live and gender equality and social policy. And now we're actually trying to figure out not only go understand it as we go. But what are we learning while we're in the middle of it because this is going on for some time. And how can we emerge better. So today we're going to be talking about remote work. I am thrilled to have all of the people that we've got here to to share their stories and their expertise. We'd love to hear from you and your stories if you've got questions. I'm going to pitch them to Cali and to he joined because I'm not sure that I've got them so let me start with you Cali. I got an email from a friend of mine this morning she said I'm really looking forward to this this conversation because I'm still in my pajamas my back hurts because I had a crappy chair yesterday. You know, I know I read I researched a lot about remote and flexible work, and I'm doing everything wrong. So, you know the seven weeks in what's it tell us about like what are you hearing you're trying to work with people.  And hearing Bridget is a couple things first we were thrown into the flexible and remote work deep end overnight. And as I like to say to people if you do this the right way. You have a whole pre pre work where you're looking at how things are going your training people you're giving them chance to practice then you're giving them a chance to review and then you're helping them even close any gaps like it's a very thoughtful, organized process and there is a pilot in that process everybody was thrown into private pilot together overnight training. There was nothing there was no readiness building like you're just in it. Okay, so I think what we're finding is, oh and happened in a crisis I'm sorry I should have added that right where we were afraid to go. Yeah, so one thing that I am hearing is people are surprised at how well it's going. Honestly, I think I have leaders who were just like, I got to tell you, if you asked me beforehand, if these jobs could be done remotely I would have told you no way and I am shocked at how people are being able to adapt and are doing what they're doing. Now, are they as productive as they were being before have they figured out exactly how to switch up the work processes and the workflow so that people are able to get their jobs done as maybe fluidly as they were. No, but that is coming along. But again I think there's an awareness and openness and I think people being impressed that we're able to kind of keep things going. Now that being said, obviously there are a whole group of people who can't necessarily work remotely. And that's why we have to kind of stop talking just about remote work. I think we have to add flexible work into that because there is an ability to be flexible with time and with teaming and that we can put in place and with those jobs that are maybe not able to be done remotely but can still keep people safe and allow an organization to operate again, perhaps not optimally right way they can keep the business going. So I want to go to Katie next so beyond that Katie because she's got one of those jobs that you didn't think you could ever do remotely. But Kelly, one of the things that I didn't do was introduce you because you know I'm having I'm having one of those days you know I'm I'm lucky not to be in my business right now. So, introduce yourself and one of the things I would like you to do before we go to Katie is talk about, you know, when we first started talking, you've been doing, you've been helping people do remote and flexible work for a long time and there was a there's been a lot of resistance to it so tell us who you are, why you're an expert, and then kind of how we got here and then we're going to switch to Katie real quick. Okay, so long story very short, my name is Kelly Williams Yoast. I am the CEO and founder of the flex strategy group and we are flexible workplace strategist we go and we help leaders reimagine how when and where work can be done, and build cultures of high performance flexibility. I have been doing this work for almost 25 years it's a very long time I've seen it. I've seen every single iteration and evolution of it. The resistance has come from just cultural entrenched culturally entrenched ideas about the way work needs to be done. And I have been very blessed over the years to work with truly visionary leaders who for a variety of reasons just saw that they needed to rethink their business model, whether it was their ability to attract and retain the best talent or to be the most productive or to just be able to leverage their resources more effectively. They saw the need to make that change happen. And once they were able to make that commitment and they understood that it was a culture shift it was about giving people a new set of skills a new way of thinking a new way of planning a new way of coordinating. Actually it's amazing what happens the the increase in productivity and engagement in the ability to get keep and retain the best people are attracting retain the best people really does increase and my hope with all of this is that this awareness that has come from this overnight pilot that we're all in is that leaders then see you know what I'm going to take it to the next level and I am going to do the work to actually shift this culture permanently and not only come through this crisis, but actually come through it in position to actually thrive. So I'm hopeful to do. I am as well. I think we all are so and he generally will be able to address some of that. But first let's go to Katie. So Katie, Cleveland, we just met this morning we have amazingly bizarre, you know, a small world close friends. You are a high school science teacher. Now talk about a job that you would never imagine could be done remotely. Tell us about tell us about what you're experiencing and you're joining us from Colorado right. Correct. Hi, thanks for having Bridget. Yes, I'm Katie Marie Cleveland, and I am a high school science teacher. It's my 35th year and never in my wildest dreams would I think that I would be teaching students remotely. So how is it. Yeah, how's it going and a learning curve for me. To say the least. I was, when we came back from spring break my plan was to do gas loss for chemistry for example, and I had liquid nitrogen ordered and can crush and all kinds of fun activities for the kids to do to learn the different types of gas laws. And now we're doing it remotely so it's changed things a lot. You know and what about just even in terms of your own, you know your own life, you know, a lot of times people I think Bloomberg just had a piece that came out today that said people's work. Their days are 12 to 15 hour days it's hard to know when to turn off. There are no boundaries anymore what's what's that like now for you. That is definitely true. My days have been extremely long, partly because instead of teaching a class of 34 students all at one time. Each student, many students will send me emails how do I do Charles law or what. How do I change pressure from millimeters of mercury to ATMs or something like that. So I'll go through an email and try to help them out and explain it and stuff sometimes I'll do FaceTime with the students. Every week I do a zoom to try to go over practice problems but instead of just one class of doing it it's multiple multiple times and then some kids can't get through on the internet. So I'll just pull up the video that I had made I've, I've become really, really good at doing YouTube videos concepts, because I need to show them the steps of how to do these so I've made quite a few YouTube videos. Yeah, that's amazing.  So he John let me turn it over to you and I'm going to let you introduce yourself and I'm sorry I've been bad about that today. And like I say I'm having a day so I'm not doing so hot myself today. So he John, you know, you've done an awful lot of really excellent work and you know if you can see in the chat, we're posting some links about remote work. You know, some tips as well as to ways to understand it and I'm hoping that we're going to get to some tips because I could so use them today. But he John, you know we talked about things that we can learn and that there's been this resistance. And it's pretty clear that the, you know, the resistance to flexible and remote work has really disadvantaged women over time and you've looked a lot at remote and flexible work and gender and what are you thinking that we're going to be learning through this pilot as Cali says. Okay, so first of all, I'm, I'm he John, John, I'm reader will associate professor in sociology and social policy at the university Kent in the UK, so six o'clock right now for me. And so, I mean, a lot of the things that I've done over the years that I was principal investigator for a project called work autonomy flexibility and work life balance which we look at the positive and the negative consequences some of it the unintended consequences of flexible working including working from home. And I say that, you know, again, a lot of people without any preparation have been kind of pushed into the situation and one thing that hasn't been mentioned is that the schools are shut childcare is shut, as well as a lot of the things that enabled women to be able to actually go into the labor market, have been completely called back so a lot of women were able to actually work from going to the labor market in full time work, only because there are, you know, childcare facilities schools after school clubs and then you know what we consider like a network of care as well as outsourcing of housework that we relied very heavily on, including going to you know, going to meals out, but also, you know, like cleaners for a lot of middle class families, etc. And that's all been dismantled in the situation that we're in. So, on one hand, it's amazing that actually so many people are able to carry out a lot of the work that we initially thought was impossible to do at home. Yeah, at home. And we also see that it's actually some of the jobs that you know again, a lot of people employers if you ask them they always say this type of job doesn't allow for working from home is actually being done in a relatively good way in a very productive way. The thing that I worry slightly about is whether what kind of expectations employers and managers have because if you were to try to compare the productivity and the amount of work people are able to do compared to like when they were in the office I think this is a really bad time to compare it like that because everybody's you know we're in groups, you know, grieving, we're in a really, we're in a crisis and pandemic where things are not normal for anybody to do even remotely close to what they were doing in the office and normal circumstances at home at the moment is is beyond what you know employers should be expecting at the moment because the right comparison shouldn't be what we were doing in the office but the comparisons would have been that no one would have been able to do anything at all. If you were to if this pandemic was done it was in the 1990s for example, majority of us would not have been able to do the kind of work that we're doing now. So let me go back to you. Oh, I'm sorry.  What was the point that you wanted to make. Oh, right. Yes, and everything there's like I was just going to talk about somebody somebody like positive but also the negative side that it's great that we're working but also you know what is the worries I have is that a lot of people trying to do as much as they were doing in the office are doing very boundary work where you're ending up putting in very long hours all the time and not being able to have your private home time or like your family time because you feel like oh I was just kind of going to because your work sphere and your family sphere or your private family sphere has been very much blurred and I see especially women with care responsibilities feeling a very high level of conflict because they feel like they're not able to do neither of the kind of roles that they feel like they are meant to fulfill. Katie I want to go to you Kelly but Katie I see you nodding and you are you also. You know on the other end of the of the spectrum you brought your mother home to live with you you took her out of independent care so that's another stress that you've now got in your life as well. Yes, it is but I'm so grateful that she's here. She would have been in seclusion in her room at the place where she was living and that would not be good for her mental health at all. Yeah, yeah. So like you're saying that we're this isn't sort of a, you know, business as usual we've got so many other things that we're trying to juggle.  But then is sort of seeing that this is even in these emergency and crisis situations is possible so can you tell us a little bit more about some of the people you're working with. There's an interesting story I was telling Bridget unfortunately this person was not comfortable enough to come on today but she is what I like to call a long time prospect of mine she's been sort of interested in my work for a while but she would admit she is a dinosaur and how she runs her department she runs a department of 450 people and a larger service organization. She's been intrigued but has never really been able to make take the steps to make change happen. So this comes along and she reached out to me recently and she said, I have to tell you she's one of the leaders is like I am shocked. And she's followed the principles, because I've been talking about the principles of reimagining work and life in crisis. And they're very specific it's you have to keep it simple. You have to start where you are it's about intention and not perfection. You have to prioritize, communicate and recalibrate and then do it again, and then do it again, and then do it again. And then you have to leverage that learning. So she started doing that.  They have taken on other work from another department actually because people had some open space in their in their schedules. They've been very understanding of the caregiving responsibilities that people have and I think that goes to the communication. There's a lot more open communication amongst managers and employees about okay so here's my reality. And this is how I'm intentionally trying to work in this period of time but this is when I have to be with my kids. I'm available. There's just a lot more coordination and collaboration and and a clarity in terms of the protocol of communication. You know, leveraging the technology that they had. It's interesting. I feel like they're all these organizations that were transitioning to Microsoft team at the beginning of the year. And now they're diving in and they're using like all the components of Microsoft team that perhaps they hadn't used before so again I think that we're going to come out on this on the other side and I love your story Katie because would you have ever stopped and taken the time to learn how to do Zoom, I mean YouTube videos to do your classes you never would have done that and you might not use that as your primary way of teaching going forward to think about these young people they love stuff like that they love being on social media and maybe from now on you'll do a few YouTube videos and throw it out there to the class. And again it's just opening our minds about how we can work differently. Now is it perfect, it is not and that's why it is intention not perfection. We have we're all BBC dad now which I love that phrase. Yeah right. You know what, I, my husband took my senile dog who is not doing well with all of this out of the out of the house because otherwise she would have sat here and barked at me the whole time because that's what she does. And he just kind of have to roll with it. Yeah, we're all making we're doing our best and we're going to keep getting better and better and better and that's where the prioritization. Then the communication and then the recalibration is just going to get a little bit better and a little bit better. And ultimately I think we're going to be in a good place where we're going to keep things going and I loved what he's even said, if this were the 90s we wouldn't be doing anything. Okay, so if that's our bar that between we're doing nothing and now we're basically keeping it moving. That's a lot. And so I'm just going to keep building on that.   What are some things that you think you could take forward with you I'd like to talk to all of you about sort of like where we move forward with this and then I do want to end with like, Okay, but what do we do now and how do we figure out how to keep every day not feeling like Groundhog Day Tuesday with no boundaries but you know how do I how do I you know get out of my yoga pants one of these days but but Katie what have you learned and what do you think how do you think that's going to change what you do in the future. One of the benefits I think one of the things I learned is how to make little videos short little videos showing clips to students of how to make organic compounds for example or how to do Charles law for example, and I have those little videos now so if I do have a student who's absent or sick or for some reason that school, I have those that I've uploaded to YouTube, so I can use this as reference so I've thought it's been a really beneficial. And then also Kelly, I wanted to say something you talked about communicating as part of this. And there was a science department meeting that was earlier this morning but that's the time that I get my mom up and help her to bathe and get dressed and get ready for the day and I was not able to make that and simply communicating with my coordinator, you know was so great because then we met separately after that when there was a time so I think people have been much more flexible. I think that's been a good positive thing for me is the communication of videos and things. I do worry a little bit about all the support systems that we have at schools, because we really do support kids in so many different ways. I mean, a library for example, or my special needs kids that need additional supports, the mental health piece, the nurses, even kids being involved in clubs and sports and activities national society. All those things help those kids study groups that I have for for biology or chemistry. So those pieces of school were not able to do right now and so I think all of us teachers are trying our best to provide those extra supports where it was other people who did it before. Right. Yeah, absolutely. The mental health piece is something that I am very worried about in particular some specific students and this is hard for them. They don't understand it. We as adults don't understand it. I can't really expect, you know, 15 16 year olds to necessarily understand as well. So that piece I am concerned about. I know my district is doing a lot to help our students. I'm sure everyone else is too. Yeah, you know, we've got a question. So we go to Linda, do you have a question and a comment that you wanted to add. Yeah, thank you for so much and really enjoying the conversation. I was kind of thinking more about when he was speaking about day cares and schools. There was a recent article by Bloomberg that came out basically stating that American working parents want to be back in the office that they're working on average three hours longer. And when some of my fellow colleagues shared it with me, my question to them was, is it that we want to work return to the office, or is it that we working parents want to continue working remotely, just with open day cares and schools, because I think that this that article could totally be used for to always be in the office together that's the most productive way. So just wanted to kind of make that comment out there and also hear thoughts on that article. Thank you. Yeah, he done. Oh yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I think it's not that we want to be in the office per se, but it's just that being able to have a dedicated time and space just to do work and not worry about family and all sorts of the housework and etc. Is what people are, I think, want to do. And again, you know, what we need to see is that a lot of people are struggling, you know, additional housework, additional care, additional, not just childcare, but also, you know, elderly care and care for family and friends that might be vulnerable at this point. But I want to get it on your point, Bridget, going forward, but one of the great things about this whole blurring that happened, which is really, you know, induces a lot of kind of conflict, the feelings of conflict between work and family life. But it's just that the idea that we are all BBC dad is that I think our employers have to see many of us in the context of family and the, you know, us outside of work because there was no other way but to. And I'm hoping that that kind of conversations but being able to see that person more holistically in the context of families and all the other demands that they're facing may open up new conversations in the future about what makes, you know, workers battle workers right. And it's not just for now, but also in the future. And yeah, just wanted to have that. So that that whole the notion that the ideal worker doesn't have any caregiving responsibilities I mean I was always struck by this one survey that was done that like CEOs and C suite managers around the world and they said who's the ideal worker, and more than three people said someone with no caregiving responsibilities.  So, so Cali what do you what do you think do you think that this is also something that could help people bring a more, I guess, authentic sense of themselves to work in the future do you think that managers will kind of shift their view of who an ideal worker is. Well I think it's showing the it's we're witnessing the real time destruction of the artificial boundary between work and life I mean it's just gone because think about it right now you're now seeing I'm seeing Bridget's office I love Bridget's I'm wondering like what are those pictures and I'm looking at beautiful bugs I'm like where are those mugs from looking at you and I'm like you're in England oh how cool is that I love England like right like I'm thinking about these things in the back of my head.  So, this is a good thing, I think it is a very good thing I think it's going to be very hard to put that genie back in the bottle I think we are all enjoying that on some level it is definitely difficult and I am not minimizing the unusual challenges that parents and caregivers and just even just the grocery store is so hard. Okay, so this is unusual and that will pass and I think that's where I want to talk about where we're going to go. Okay, it could take two years it could take 18 months, we're ultimately going to get beyond this. Now we have to start to think about the next phase okay so we get past this very extreme safe at home period, then we start to begin the evolution where it becomes a hybrid on site remote work dialing it down dialing it up depending upon what's going on with the virus. And that's really the next phase so if there was an article in the Washington Post by Jenna McGregor who I think says a great job of covering the workplace and she started to talk about what that's going to look like and you can see already companies are saying they have to keep all the desks further apart and they have to have people stagger their time coming in and well that means you are actually not going to be able to be able to have everybody on site you're just not. Then you also have the fact that schools and camps are not going to be open probably until the fall. So you're going to have to accommodate the fact that you can't get everybody on site, and you have to have the accommodate the fact that the caregiving is just not going to be there. So I think the next thing we have to move into is how do we create that culture of flexibility what are the tools that people that managers need to manage. How are the skills and tools that teams need to coordinate with each other in this way. What are the skills and tools that individuals need to put those good boundaries up so that they aren't just working all the time. Yeah, how to do that so we're all kind of doing this in real time. And I think the next phase when things calm down a little bit it's less intense and we're less scared perhaps we can begin to say what are those skills and tools what is that framework of operation. It's not enough to give people a platform I'm getting a little nervous that we're talking a lot about technology and technology is a tool. Technology is not the way we need to work. So that's the next phase what is it how do we have to work and how do we have to make this happen together. Yeah, so we're coming down on time. Oh yeah, so I was going to bring in Rajiv. Are you, you made a really great point in the chat so we'll have Rajiv, and then he down will go to you the thought that you had so so hold on to that so Rajiv would love to hear from you. Hi, Bridget. Hi, Kelly. The question I had was just have noticing I've been working independently for so long just second nature but I notice more and more people sort of thrown into this overnight they discover after a few weeks that they're missing those really tiny human interactions, the water cooler conversations, everything online is always very formal. And so how do we mitigate that and I wonder if you know Kelly and he John with their work have come up with tips and techniques for people to do. First, hi Raj. It's nice to see you. So I love that question, because I do think while we're in this phase where it's the safe at home where we're mostly remote you really have to be much more intentional about how you're having some of those moments.  Okay, you can also have slack open and just be connecting people with slack if you're okay with the technology but start with where you are don't start adopting all sorts of new ways to communicate you can even just pick up the phone and call people. However, this is this next phase that we go into. That's why people ask me are we all going remote. I don't think so. I think people still do want to be together but it'll have to be in a very intentional way. In the workplace not full time I don't think it'll be that hybrid model again, but in the meantime be creative about how you are intentionally connecting with people to have those moments because Raj you're right. People. Absolutely. Let's give you the let's give you the last word here. All right. Okay, just on Raj's point like what we you know we stop WhatsApp as well just as a casual conversation at Hawke with some of my colleagues which in a larger company setting but my husband who works in a smaller company they just have, even when they were working in the office because they had different offices with software engineers in different locations they just always had a chat going and all sorts of things happening there. But one of the things I want to mention about when we kind of go back what's going to happen was what's kind of the next steps. I think we need to be worried. I mean that to be very cautious but especially employers is that what I've noticed is that I mean we still need more data on this but a lot of the caregiving work a lot of the additional house of work burden have been falling on women and also because employers in a way assume that will be falling on women. I've heard stories about some women not being given the opportunity to work from home. I've heard a lot of those stories in the previous time before COVID where that was one of the biggest reasons why employers especially female dominated workplaces but also women work from home even when their male counterparts were given the same opportunity. Now due to this COVID virus a lot of people were given the opportunity and I'm hoping that the employers now can see actually give women the opportunity to work from home so that they could actually manage. But what happens is employers don't see men and fathers not the fathers but men with all sorts of other families and friends who might need that kind of care not as carers is that they don't give the people opportunities to have those discussions or have that kind of reshaping their works to fulfill it even if they want to if their employers don't ever give them the opportunity they'll end up kind of shifting that burden onto their female spouses and a lot of the women having had that double burden or triple burden if you even consider the emotional kind of labor of having to worry about family members and worry about your children's well being they're going to be really not only conflicted but they might have to withdraw a lot of their labor market kind of activities the longer this goes the longer this bulk school closure and the COVID virus goes on and it is a bit of a worry so again the key thing is that both men but also employers need to respond that that kind of responsibilities have to lie with both men and women. Absolutely and that is a great way to to end this conversation that I think that's a really important point that workplace as a managers need to expect that as Kelly said we are all the people that we see dead and we all have caregiving and that when we have workplace expectations that understand that in value care that's when we can you know one potential really great opportunity to have real gender equality out of this in a really real way. So I want to thank Katie and he Jung and Kelly for for joining me today and having this great conversation. I want to thank all of the participants with your great quotes and comments and perspective. I do have some remote resources that will be sending out Cali I want to hear your principles and I want to learn them so we can get them from you will share those out as well. I also want to thank my better life lab team the new America events team, my producer David Shulman everybody's great thank you so much for helping me put this together. This week we're going to be talking about childcare and the crowd childcare in the time of Corona. So we hope that you all will join us again and thank you all wash your hands and stay safe and we'll get through this right.


Hi, I'm Mark Vence from Brave Wilderness, and it's day three here at Davos. And I'd like to share three things that I've learned that we can all take note of. From all the conversations that I've had here at Davos, the one thing that I've realized is that the countries that are the least to blame for the climate crisis are the ones feeling it the most. So with that, we all need to do our part to turn the words of conservation and sustainability into real and lasting action. Next, as a world, we have showed such initiative and willingness to adapt to the COVID pandemic, but now we need to show the same urgency and productivity to safeguard our planet. We've proven if we can all come together for a shared goal, we can focus our energy and together make a lasting change. And finally, in the words of Elizabeth Watutu, an open heart is where the seed of true action lies. And with open hearts, open minds, we can all connect with each other and make this world a happier and brighter place for the future. These are some of my takeaways from my time here at Davos.


First of all, I need to make a little apology. The title that you see here is not the title that I advertised on the agenda. Talking with folks this morning, we've done a little bit of a bait and switch. We're looking at exactly the same problem, but from a little bit of a different perspective, from a community perspective of how wide we even need to do this. And so I just want to talk about the simple reality that we need to confront. The digital winter is coming. So some of the things that we can't cover in this talk, if you have a look at the two videos that I've made from Talks1, it was at CCC camp a couple of months back, and then earlier in the year at LinuxConf in Christchurch in New Zealand talking about the megaphone device.  So what on earth am I talking about with a digital winter? And it's actually tightly interrelated with the freedoms that we have enjoyed in, you know, modern liberal democracies, really kind of came about at the end of World War II, right, that the Pax Americana for all of its other problems kind of pushed this idea of individual freedom. And so we had, you know, this huge growth in technology and art and culture, all sorts of things that came about because of that freedom. And so around the 70s and 80s, you know, the real digital spring happened where digital devices started being useful. People started having computers at home and at work and using them and mobile phones came along. And this was really fantastic. And we're like, oh, we're so excited about what this will mean when it comes to fruition. We could see the flowers. We could smell what was going on. We could see that something exciting is going to happen. And then later in the 20th century and really sort of until about now, we've been enjoying the fruit of that. In fact, the fruit is so plentiful it's sitting on the ground. We don't even have to reach up to the tree. You know, we have a device. I mean, who here doesn't have a mobile phone with them? I'm curious. One of you. Excellent. Everybody else has a mobile phone with them because it's so easy and so convenient and so tasty, right? It does all of these things that we want. The trouble is in the digital summer. And I think we've just passed the end point of the digital summer. Everything is plentiful. Everything is easy. But the seasons march on. And we have seen the use of technology by nation states, by all sorts of malevolent forces being used against people, depriving people of this food source on which they have become dependent. So you cut communications off during elections now to avoid unhelpful criticism of government. And we're seeing this kind of thing more and more. And attacks on press freedom at home in Australia, right? We have our government basically backing police raids on journalists to try and find out who their secret sources are because they embarrass the government. And so this is a growing problem. And so this is why I say that we've actually, I think, in the last decade, we're actually no longer in the digital summer. We're in the digital autumn. There are leaves that are going funny colors. At the moment, there's still plenty of fruit on the ground and there's still some fruit on the trees. But we can see the writing on the wall, the freedoms, the digital freedom, the digital sovereignty that we once enjoyed in the 1980s and early 1990s is now largely a thing of the past. And the thing about the digital autumn is it's actually dangerous because autumn is the most beautiful time of year with trees, right? We have these beautiful golden red colors, you know, people go for drives to see the autumn leaves. We see them on the ground, it covers the ground. Everything looks fantastic. And we still, there's still plenty of food coming from these late harvests. And so we're lulled into a false sense of security saying, oh, it can't be that bad. Winter is still a long way off. We'll figure out ways to deal with these increasingly diminished digital freedoms on the ability for us to maintain communications in the face of adversaries. The ability for us to create hardware that we truly own, that does what we want, that does not actually, we pay for it. But I can see an Apple device there with its happy piece of fruit facing me at the moment. And this is fantastic, you know, that Apple devices are beautifully built, lovely to use, but particularly if we're talking about the phones, do you really own an iPhone or do you merely pay for an iPhone and have its physical form in your hand to enjoy, but only to the extent to which the vendor is willing for you to enjoy, and only in the ways in which the vendor is willing for you to enjoy. And so these freedoms are being restricted. And I think there is a very real chance that we are going to go into a digital winter. And the trouble with the digital winter is once you're there and decide that you should have prepared for the digital winter, it's now too late. You are fighting for your survival. You are fighting to maintain the remaining digital capabilities that you have. Supply chains are no longer trustable or no longer working or no longer present at all depending on how the future pans out. Now, if we had another global scale unrest at some point, this whole interconnected global supply chain that's largely focused in a few countries is going to become unavailable to most countries. How do we maintain the ability of people to create digital artifacts to meet their needs when you can't even manufacture a new device? Or it might be that we don't have outright war, we just move further into this rights-restricted dystopia that we seem to be heading into of all of these actors wanting to restrict what we can do with a digital device for economic reasons, for political reasons. It actually doesn't matter what the reason is. So we need to prepare before the digital winter comes so that we don't starve before the digital winter ends. Because the digital winter left to its own course won't end quickly. If we don't have, and if people around the world don't have the means to communicate, to self-organize, to hold governments to account, we will actually just drive deeper and deeper into the digital winter. Who has read or seen the Chronicle of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, right? If we don't act, we are actually headed for a digital, not just a six-month digital winter, we are headed for 100 years of snow and ice under a variety of white witches. Because as these actors deprive us of the ability to create our own digital futures, they will continue to set the agenda and work against us having the ability and the freedom to do these things. You might say that I'm being horribly pessimistic about things, but look back at the history of individual freedoms in this world. The time that we have had since World War II is an aberration in the world. Never before in the history of humanity has there been as much personal freedom in at least some countries as there has been in this post-war period. Now, what's somewhat ironic is that it was created in order to further commercial gains for the United States in particular, but it had this side effect of creating freedom.  Asian history prior to that, plenty of wars. African history prior to that, plenty of wars. And across the world, very limited freedom for the average person to live to try and make the world a better place. But we are not without hope. I'm convinced that we can bring about a second digital spring or possibly that we can even avoid the digital winter by, if you like, creating a digital food source so that, yes, it might get cold. They are chilling times at the moment. But that is we hold governments to account as we empower citizens and we empower everyone to be a functioning civil society because communications is the basis of civil society and transactions are, of course, merely a form of communications. So we need to find ways to sustain these capabilities. We need to think very differently about how we do things because what's clear is that the current approach that, you know, of devices of phones, they are so complex that they are just this beautiful garden in which adversaries can plant the weeds that will undermine those things that will choke out the real important uses and deprive us of the sovereignty that we need, the agency that we need over these devices. So how can we make sure that we come back to a digital summer or that we can avoid a digital winter altogether? We need to act now. We need to start thinking how can we create devices that are independent of the internet, that are independent of vendor support, that are possible to be secured and for that security to be maintained going forward in the absence of a global internet, of global support, even from the communities that we know today, if things become more balcony-ized on the internet, it may not be possible to have global open-source projects anymore. How can we reduce that capability burden, capability maintenance burden, down to the level where one or a few determined users are actually able to make something which will be sustainable and insustainable in the face of determined adversaries whose intention it is to deprive us of these things. And so this is where the megaphone project has come in. So this is why this phone is bizarre, right? We've made a phone device is quite large at the moment. We're obviously going to make it smaller. This is how large it is just from making it in the lab for 500 euros, right? But miniaturization is totally doable. But this device is based on the Commodore 64 architecture because we kind of think what is the simplest, i.e. the easiest to maintain, the easiest to inspect, the easiest to detect compromise in that can still do useful things. Because you go back further than the early home computers of the 1980s, they weren't user-friendly, they weren't usable. There were mainframes that were kind of crazy complicated or there was extremely simple hobby devices. But the early 80s marked the first time where you could have productivity software on your computer at home. And it was usable, and yet it was still just tens of kilobytes. So the prototype dialer app that we've made for this thing is about 28 kilobytes written in Commodore 64 basic. So this is extremely easy to inspect. In terms of can one determined user maintain it? Well, one possibly slightly determined user, a student working for one semester 20 hours a week wrote the dialer from scratch and he had never touched a Commodore 64 in his life before. So we know that it is possible to make these kinds of devices. What we need to do is to grow the community that's looking at these things and think about how we can make hybrid devices where the simple, trustable architecture can enslave a modern complex untrustable processor so that we don't have to lose any functionality. And that's the next iteration of the megaphone that we're working on at the moment does exactly that. We're putting a Raspberry Pi that can run Android as a slave processor. The 8-bit computer pretends to be the touch interface and the video output and everything so that the Android thinks that it's a ship and a bottle, right? It just continues as it was. We have to make no changes. We don't have to recompile it at all. So we have no capability, maintenance burden whilst someone else is maintaining the Android port or even if it's unsupported, we can run it in a complete isolated manner. So we can still play Pokemon, well Pokemon Go requires internet, right? But we could, there's a whole bunch of things that we can do offline. We could have encrypted email clients and things that are in the complex processor if we need to. But we also need to think about saying, well, we actually could do email on 1980s computers. Let's take that spirit of crazy optimization that exists on the Commodore 64 in particular and say, well, let's actually make an email program that is sufficiently functional to be useful but that can run in the secure 8-bit environment. So we can go down, we can suspend the running of the 8-bit computer. We've designed this in and we have what we call matrix modes. We have the nice green letters come down and then you can inspect the entire state of the machine and it's frozen at that point. So there's nothing that malicious software can do to hide. And you could actually have a printout of every byte of your email program, for example, and compare that if you're in a particularly paranoid mode to not even, to not just confirm that it was once secure, but that right now it is unsullied, uncompromised. And I know of no other approach to digital sovereignty and secure computing that's able to deliver that, the full sovereignty back into the hands of the owner of the device so that you can truly own the device. You can repurpose it. You can do whatever you want with it. And our next challenge is how we can try and create a viable business model around that. We're actually looking at creating bespoke mobile devices for people living with disability because this is a horribly underserved sector at the moment. There are people who, for example, if you have cerebral palsy, you might not have fine motor control. So using a touchscreen is really hard because your hand only has really coarse movements. But they might be able to, for example, use a joystick interface. So we can make the 8-bit supervisor that we call the little brother can pretend to be the touchscreen panel but driven by a joystick. You're right, here is now a phone-like device that someone who could never use a smartphone before can now use and it can run all the Android apps that they want. They can participate fully in the digital world and that this is a use case that, as I say, can be economically profitable, socially profitable, and that the community, the broad, non-technical community, are like, hey, this is great. This is a, we need this kind of technology because it bridges a digital divide. It gives agency to people who need agency. And we can further show that the digital sovereignty really helps in that space. And say, okay, we can actually make a predictive text input model that is general for folks that might like that kind of device, but then they can say, you know what? I can actually modify that. I can change the code on this simple machine because it's simple. I don't have to even think about how do I compile Android? I can modify it in real time on the device and say, oh, look, now I can do this and I can now do input 40% or 400% faster than I could with the one-size-fits-all kind of approach. So we think that there are viable business models around making this kind of device. And this is actually really important to us because remember, we're in the digital autumn. Who knows the ESOP's fable of the grasshopper and the ant? Not many, maybe have a read. So the general story is this grasshopper is, you know, playing is fiddling and having a great time in the summer while the ant is busy putting food away to the winter. Because the grasshopper says, oh, but there's always more food. There's always more time. We don't need to do anything now. The ant knows winter is coming. And so then when winter comes and the ants are well-fed and warm and well-supplied and the grasshopper is begging the ants for food, let us not. We are the community who are aware of this need. We know winter is coming. Let us not merely be idle as the grasshopper was, but let us work diligently and have fun while we're doing it to create these technologies that will help us to survive a digital winter where everything is stacked against people being able to communicate and maintain civil society. And it might even be that in that process we can stop the digital winter in its tracks before it even happens. Are there any questions? Feel free to come up to the microphone. Hello. You said that you think this is a profitable project. I'm having a little bit of trouble hearing. Sorry. No, it's on the microphone. Maybe that sounds better. Even closer. It's quite... It's okay. Okay, that's it. You said you think this is a profitable project. Do you remember what happened to OpenMoco project? Sorry, do I know? OpenMoco. OpenMoco. M-O-K-O. Oh, OpenMoco, yeah. Yeah, so they're making cellular modems and all of this. I love what they're doing, right? The more things we can do on the more fronts, the better. But if the cellular networks are not available, we can't use OpenMoco. Cellular transmissions have been used in the past. So when Russia was invading Crimea, the Russians were targeting Crimean artillery by their mobile phone emissions. So we need... I love OpenMoco and I want to see it continue and do great things, but we need to have a whole variety of things so that if there is any one particular attack that society, civil society can be resilient to it. We need not a monoculture, but we need to have a diversity, a complete ecosystem of different things. I don't want everyone just to make megaphones. I want people to make all manner of sovereign devices so that we are truly resistant. So that if even one gets some terrible disease to use the ecological model and is wiped out, the rest are there and more keep coming up. Cool. If there's any further questions, I'll be outside. I'm easy to find. We have 15 seconds. How do we get friends and family to care about this if we believe this story? How do we get family and friends to care about it? This is hard. This is why I think the disability angle is a good one and just the need for family and friends to communicate with one another and not have to pay for the privilege I think is actually the best angle to get family and friends to think about it. It works in Vanuatu. I can't see why it can't work here in other countries as well. So I need to clear the stage, but happy to catch people outside.


This is Momoe from Nigeria. This is from Bahia. Come on, man. How do you guys call it? No, no. It's originally from Nigeria. It's called Abara. Abara. Yeah, of course. Nigerian brought to Brelia. But now, you know, we haven't... It's a little bit different. But it's the same way you had that. This is an Afro-religious food. It's called Sibirafrit. Can I taste it? Yeah. It's not mine, you know? I'm sorry. I saw it and I'm like, Momoe from Nigeria. She put this... And even with the... The okra. The banana leaf. Yeah, it comes with the banana leaf. It's exactly the same. It's okra? Okra, yeah. Karolu. Karolu. We call it Karolu.


Does anybody wonder what the future of physical retail stores is going to be in New Jersey and beyond? Hey there, NJRoot22.com here with a question, will shopping ever be the same? Our first thought is about this fear, what about all this fear and the big bad bogeyman monster? You look around the real world, we drive around all the time, we're observing people. We don't see this big giant crisis. I don't want to use the word honestly, but if you look at the news, which I like to put in quotes or official reports, they tell you a pretty darn scary story, and it appears that most people are buying into it. It doesn't seem like that to us. Everything seems perfectly fine, frankly. Of course, the shopping has dropped down considerably, and we're just wondering how that's going to affect things overall over the coming months and years. We wonder what would happen if they, I use they in quotes, the officials, the people who are telling everybody how to behave and think. What if they say things are okay? You know what, no big deal anymore. It's all done. What percentage of the population will be forever afraid and will always wear masks and scared of touching things because they think there's some sort of bad germ on there? I see people wearing masks in 10 years from now, half the people are going to be wearing masks just like they do in Japan, but the business is really what I'm really thinking about. Oddly enough, I think you talked to any liquor store, they're doubling their month over month or month over year over year sales, double, 100% higher, and then of course the stores that were allowed to remain open, a lot of them like Costco for instance, their sales have gone down, at least in the gas section. Gas sales have tumbled I think half because nobody's going anywhere, but anyway, the scene behind me here is taken from one of these, it's the major strip mall in Clinton, New Jersey, has a Walmart and a shop right and a TJ Maxx which is closed. This was taken, this cool scene you see behind me, it was taken with a newly acquired drone, I finally bought a drone that works and it's pretty cool and that's my, I'm going to have a lot more of these backgrounds as you watch my videos, but anyway, the whole thing is it's like the business model I think is going to be changed forever and there's three, at least for the foreseeable near future, but there's three little factors in play here in my opinion, maybe four, but the fourth is more of an overall thing. The first thing is the property owners, these are people that own the buildings and they charge rent and they want tenants to pay the top rent or whatever the going market rate is for that region or area and then you have the tenants who, they have other things to factor in like overhead, you know, I don't know, property owners, some people may own the property outright or pay mortgages, they have to at least meet their mortgage payments and be able to pay for staff and so on and maintenance and insurance and all that stuff, everybody has overhead, but the tenants also like the Walmart's and the small shops and the small business owners all have overhead as well and the amount of revenue they're getting and that depends on whether the state allows people to shop or if they have a certain capacity limit, it's so stupid, it's beyond belief and then of course the customers are the ultimate driver of all this because without customers you wouldn't have tenants and you wouldn't have the property owners would lose because they would just be sitting on a property that they have to pay taxes on and get no revenue at all. So to make this work, if everything is reduced, let's say consumer revenue is reduced or expenditures reduced, somebody has to lose and like I should have said that customers will stop shopping at stores if prices go up and prices normally go up when rents go up and so on, so it's a lot of nipping and tucking that has to go on, but someone has to lose, someone's going to, if there's reduced expenditure at stores, maybe the loss has to be split equally like slightly higher prices, lower revenue per store and lower revenue for property owners, but I mean who's willing to deal with that and at some given point in time it becomes not worth it, so who knows, I really don't know, but and of course you have the general economy and whether people have jobs and have money to spend as well as the online competition that's happening out there, it's easy just to click on your phone, buy a thing on Amazon or whatever, Walmart or whatever it may be Etsy or eBay even. I've been going to eBay a lot more lately because you get things faster and it just seems like a lot of hustlers out there want to make a buck too, but will things ever get back to normal? That's the question and I have a strange feeling, unless somebody comes out and says, hey the whole thing was a hoax and this was a waste of time, which like I said doesn't change how some people are going to be scared forever, but this drama is going to go on for the foreseeable future, I'd suggest at least a couple years, so if you like the video please hit the bell and subscribe and all that stuff and I'll talk to you soon.