Why Successful Central Bank Digital Currencies require Partnership engagement

In Part 1 of this blog series we explored what CBDC, or Central Bank Digital Currencies are, and why they are important. Successful completion of CBDC projects requires the involvement of multiple partners. There are several key features CBDC has to implement and Thales can help with a few: Security, Offline CBDC and digital ID wallets.

The end user drives the use case, the use case drives the partner selection

To gauge the extent of partnerships required it is important to consider all stakeholders that stand to benefit from any particular use case. McKinsey define innovation as “the systematic practice of developing and marketing breakthrough products and services for adoption by customers”. ‘Development’ and ‘breakthrough’ are handled by technology stakeholders. However, these CBDC technology stakeholders should recognise that success is in sustained “adoption by customers”, not just in releasing new products. The table below shows examples of real world CBDC use cases being explored globally with customer requirements at their heart; also shown are the ecosystem partnerships involved highlighting the variety of stakeholders required: