Mastercard’s President of Global Enterprise Growth, Raghu Malhotra, gave his views on Digital Payment Regulations in Asia recently to Asia Business Outlook. His starting point was to argue for harmonised regulations in order to increase cross-border transactions and financial inclusion. If there can be a seamless operation across four countries versus a single country, the economics will differ and benefit the end consumer and merchants.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has published a working paper looking at ensuring that a digital euro does not impact financial stability or the transmission of monetary policy.

The ECB has published a blog ‘Making the digital euro truly private’, with privacy an important concern for CBDCs. A strong focus on privacy will never convince sceptics and the realities of know your customer and anti-terror funding legislation have to be accommodated.

It is unclear whether the public and merchants will use a central bank digital currency (CBDC) to make a payment. The European Central Bank (ECB) has published a paper that explores this based on survey payment data and using a quantitative framework that estimates CBDC demand based on individuals’ preferences for the attributes of different payment options.

Digital-only financial inclusion (DoFI) can increase convenience for financially included people, and lead to cost savings for providers of financial services. On the back of this, today digital payments are promoted by governments and digital payment companies alike as a solution to financial inclusion for all. A recently published paper examines the dangers of DoFI.

The European Central Bank has started to make the case for a digital euro. The central bank's Programme Director Digital Euro recently noted that a digital euro, while complementing cash, would strengthen Europe’s strategic sovereignty by reducing dependence on non-European payment providers and offer another form of trusted and secure transactions for people in Europe.

A technical article by Manuel Muñoz and Oscar Soons, unusually, considers the role of CBDCs as a store of value instrument for consumers.

The ECB is looking to sign five agreements worth about €1.1 billion for a four year pilot of a Digital Euro starting early 2025.

Mastercard’s Asia-Pacific lead for blockchain and digital assets has spoken about CBDCs in the region. He argues that consumers are so comfortable with existing payment options that a CBDC is not justified.

A paper published by the Munich Personal RePEc Archive has carried out secondary research on Africa’s adoption of CBDCs.