To lay the groundwork and provide some food for thought for today’s discussion, let me briefly present three major trends in payments that are driving the debates on CBDC: The digitalisation of our economy, the declining use of cash, and emerging new forms of money. 2 Trends in payments Our economy is becoming more and more digital, and the transformation is even gathering pace.
E-commerce and all kinds of other online services are surging, and they are getting a further boost in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Internet of Things is making machine-tomachine communications a reality, and it will likely result in a need for machine-to-machine payments. The pace of digitalisation has probably never been faster than it is today.