Signe Krogstrup: Money and payments - the five C's

Speech by Ms Signe Krogstrup, Governor of the National Bank of Denmark, at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Frankfurt am Main, 19 February 2024.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

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Introduction

It is a pleasure and an honour to be here and to speak at the new Centre for Central Banking at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. I want to thank Prof. Jens Weidmann for inviting me. And I would like to congratulate all of you on the establishment of this new centre. I am confident that we can expect many valuable insights on topics that are high on the central banking agenda in the coming years.

One topic high on this agenda is also my topic for today: digital and technological developments in money and payments, and implications for the fundamental questions of trust in money, financial stability and robustness of our payments infrastructure.

The landscape of money and payments is constantly evolving. In the past decades, money and payments have increasingly moved from banknotes and coin to digital bank deposits with associated card and app payments in many countries. We have been particularly early movers in Denmark. In the past five years alone, I stopped carrying cash, got rid of my physical wallet, and largely stopped visiting my bank except online. I have instead added several new types of digital means of payment to my accounts and phone. I am far from being a unique case. Large parts of the Danish population are following this trend, starting with the young, but the older segments of the population are catching up. In this way, we are not unlike other Scandinavian countries. And many other countries are currently heading in a similar direction.

There are important advantages to the increasing use of cards and other forms of digital payments. However, developments also bring up concerns, notably about the declining use of cash, the trust in money and the robustness of the payments infrastructure. Moreover, cyber security has become increasingly important. Meanwhile, crypto-based technology is giving rise to new types of assets that may or may not become more broadly adopted. And finally some central banks are considering introducing central bank digital currencies (CBDC)