According to the ECB, banks are "barking up the wrong tree" over the CBDC deposit flight.

The European Central Bank asserts that stablecoins and electronic money institutions are a greater threat to the deposit base than banks are, saying that banks are "barking up the wrong tree" when they worry about the effects of deposit flight from a future digital euro.

Madilyn Swift

February 21, 2024

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The European Central Bank (ECB) is working hard to dispel several misconceptions regarding the potential role of a digital euro in a blog post. They maintain that the new digital currency would be created with the intention of maintaining the commercial banks' ability to conduct business.

It does this by limiting the amount of digital euros that any one person may own and by prohibiting retailers from keeping any digital euros that are processed at the register. In addition, the digital euro would not bear interest—a fact that Andy Haldane, a former economist at the Bank of England, has referred to as a "stealth tax scandal".

As to the ECB, users will have the ability to effortlessly connect their digital euro account to a bank payment account, so facilitating a'reverse waterfall' procedure. This removes the requirement to prefund the digital euro account in order to make online payments because, if the linked commercial bank account has enough money available, any shortfall would be immediately compensated.

However, banking associations, bank-sponsored think tanks, and academics have persisted in publishing studies highlighting the risks associated with removing financial intermediaries from transactions through the potential issuance of CBDCs in general and of a digital euro in particular, even though mitigation measures have been explicitly included in the design of CBDCs.

The central bank claims that banks should pay more attention to how new players could be a bigger risk to bank funding than CBDCs and that they are "barking up the wrong tree" when they depend on research that ignore the defined design aspects of a digital euro.

"Stablecoins, e-money institutions and other narrow bank constructs, some sponsored by big tech companies with huge customer bases, do not care about the role of banks in the economy," according to the European Central Bank (ECB). "Non-banks have no obvious incentive to limit the use of their stablecoins or the services they offer, and the use of stablecoins could become significant."