The concern is that this could lead to less stable and more costly funding, lower bank profitability and, ultimately, lower lending, constraining the financing of the real economy. I would make two points here. First, the risk of bank disintermediation depends on the design features of a digital euro. We can and should design it in ways that prevent this risk.
I will come back to this crucial issue in more detail. Second, the ECB does not plan to interact directly with potentially hundreds of millions of users of a digital euro. We simply would not have the capacity or the resources to do so. Financial intermediaries – in particular banks – would provide the front-end services, as they do today for cash-related operations.