Joachim Nagel, President of the Deutsche Bundesbank and Member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB), has raised concerns about central banks’ business model. “If part of your core product is loosening attractiveness then you have to think about another new core product,” he stressed.
ECB's Joachim Nagel Urges Central Banks to Evolve: 'We Need to Work on Our Business Model'
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‘We Need to Speed up on All This’
Joachim Nagel, President of the Deutsche Bundesbank and Member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB), has underscored the urgency for central banks to modernize and incorporate digital currencies into their systems.
Speaking on a panel on central bank digital currencies ( CBDCs) at a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) conference, Nagel highlighted the critical need for a new business model and emphasized the potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) to drive this transformation. He said on Monday in Basel that if people had asked him 20 years ago if the central bank business model was “destroyable or not,” he would have answered “no.” However, he admitted:
Now I am not so sure anymore — We need to work on our business model. And DLT is just a means, an instrument that could help us here to get to that point.
Nagel also noted the progression of the digital euro project. The ECB last year moved to the next stage of its digital euro project — preparing the ground to issue the currency in the coming years, though a final decision has yet to be taken.
Regarding the digital euro, the Bundesbank chief believes that “it’s a necessity to really get there,” emphasizing: “We need to speed up on all this.” Nagel stressed that adapting to digital innovations, including the digital euro, is essential as the attractiveness of traditional physical money declines. He opined:
If part of your core product is loosening attractiveness then you have to think about another new core product.
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