The European Commission has launched a targeted consultation on the expected impact of a digital euro on key industries, institutions, consumers, merchants and other stakeholders in international trade.
The consultation is aimed at industry specialists and experts across the financial, payments and retail sectors, and marks the latest phase in the EC’s project to develop a legislative framework for the issuance and use of a digital euro.
“The present targeted consultation complements the European Central Bank’s public consultation,” the EC says.
“It aims to collect further information from industry specialists, payment service providers (including credit institutions, payment and e-money institutions), payment infrastructure providers, developers of payment solutions, merchants, merchant associations, consumer associations, retail payments regulators, and supervisors, anti-money laundering (AML) supervisors, financial intelligence units and other relevant authorities and experts.
“This targeted consultation will gather further evidence on the following issues:
- Users’ needs and expectations for a digital euro
- The digital euro’s role for the EU’s retail payments and the digital economy
- Making the digital euro available for retail use while continuing to safeguard the legal tender status of euro cash
- The digital euro’s impact on the financial sector and the financial stability
- Application of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) rules
- The privacy and data protection aspects
- International payments with a digital euro.
“This targeted consultation in no way pre-judges whether and how these issues will be covered in a legislative proposal by the Commission, or the future scope of that proposal.”
The EC is inviting industry specialists to contribute via a questionnaire between now and 14 June.
It announced in February that it plans to propose a legislative framework for the digital euro in “early 2023”.
The ECB officially launched its digital euro project with a two-year investigation phase in July 2021.
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