LILAS DEMMOU | Deputy Head of the Structural Policy Analysis Division at the OECD Economics Department, OECD
QUENTIN SAGOT | Junior Advisor, Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, OECD

Recent technological developments linked to secure messaging and traceability present an opportunity to address certain challenges in international and domestic payment systems. From an international perspective, foreign exchange markets remain costly and relatively less efficient than domestic payment systems. From a domestic perspective, the decline in the relative importance of cash in most economies reflects changes in consumers’ preferences, which questions the future of money and payment infrastructure. 

Against that background, private initiatives falling outside of current regulation, such as stablecoins and other virtual assets, are associated with several risks and opportunities and have fueled the debate on the merit for central banks to issue new form of digital public currency. This article reviews these different propositions and examines their implications for the international and domestic payment systems.