The Riksbank is one of the central banks that will need to take an active stance on whether or not to issue a digital currency first. We cannot wait any longer, and I shall now tell you what we intend to do in the coming years. We will need to work within three different areas at once. Firstly, we need to identify what technologies can be used. This includes investigating both decentralised and centralised alternatives. It is important not to exclude alternatives in advance and thus limit the room for manoeuvre. Perhaps what we need is a combination of centralisation and decentralisation? We also need to study what technical competence we have, and what we need. We need to investigate in what way payments in e-krona can be initiated: with smartphones, plastic cards or in other ways. The second area is what I call policy issues, where we study the potential effects on the Riksbank, the payment market, monetary policy, financial stability and so on. Here, we ask ourselves what properties an e-krona should have to best meet the needs we see in the economy. I discussed examples of these questions earlier. The third area concerns legal issues. Examples here are what opportunities and what flexibility the Riksbank’s current mandate allows us, how different laws affect the requirements we should make of an e-krona system and so on. Even if we intend to work within these different areas in parallel, there will be interdependencies that we must take into account.
These advocates say that this would make it easier for the central bank to implement an efficient monetary policy with a negative interest rate. 10 This reasoning is based on the central bank being prevented from setting a negative interest rate to the extent considered necessary to stimulate economic activity. Personally, I am not convinced that this problem would arise in Sweden and I would once again like to say that the Riksbank has a statutory requirement to issue banknotes and coins. I see e-krona primarily as a complement to cash. 10 The idea is as follows. If the central bank introduces a negative interest rate, economic agents will choose to  hold cash, which does not have an interest rate, instead of deposits with the banks. This means that the central bank's policy loses impact at the level where the agents begin to prefer cash. This is often referred to in academic research as the “zero lower bound” problem. 8 [10]  The issuing of e-krona together with a positive interest rate on e-krona could affect financial stability in the banking sector. Today, the banking sector functions as a system of communicating vessels. If a consumer or a company withdraws money from a bank, this money comes into another bank, either as a deposit or as payment for a product or service.