But why do central banks take this seemingly contradictory position? The main aim of this speech is to explain the background to this. First allow me to outline Japan's current status regarding retail payments -- that is, developments in person-to-person (P2P) money transfers and person-to-merchant (P2M) payments -- and then talk about the possible forms of CBDC and its expected roles.
2 See Andersson, M., Kok, C., Mirza, H., Móré, C. and Mosthaf, J. (2018), “How can euro area banks reach  sustainable profitability in the future?”, Special Feature, Financial Stability Review, ECB, November. 3 See Constâncio, V. (2017), “Challenges faced by the European banking sector”, speech at the Risk &  Supervision 2017 Conference organised by Associazione Bancaria Italiana, Rome, 14 June.