Andréa Maechler, a member of the board of directors of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), has changed her position on the issuance of a digital franc by the central bank.
According to a Tuesday note by Reuters journalist John Revill, Maechler said officials at the country’s central bank “believe the risks outweigh the benefits” when it comes to CBDCs. The board member said that getting the general public to use a digital franc in day-to-day transactions would probably not help promote financial inclusion in Switzerland, where nearly the entire workforce already has access to bank accounts.
“This does not mean that the SNB is not interested in CBDCs, but rather that our goal is to study the role that wholesale CBDCs could play,” Maechler said, adding that the central bank needed to take into account privacy issues and the possibility of the digital currency being used for illicit transactions.
The board member’s statement comes after the SNB announced that it had integrated a wholesale CBDC into the banking systems of five commercial banks in Switzerland. At the time, Maechler seemed to encourage implementation, stating that “central banks must keep abreast of technological changes” in an effort to ensure monetary and financial stability.
Testing the introduction of a wholesale CBDC was part of the second phase of Project Helvetia, an initiative aimed at preparing central banks for tokenized financial assets based on distributed ledger technology (DLT). During the fourth quarter of 2021, the SNB integrated the wholesale CBDC into the existing systems and processes of Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg and UBS.
Switzerland was also a testing ground for many crypto projects and products in 2021. In September, the Swiss Financial Markets Supervisory Authority approved one of the first crypto funds operating in the country, the Crypto Market Index Fund. The SIX Swiss Exchange is currently counting on several cryptocurrency-based exchange-traded products, in addition to its own plans to launch a digital asset market and central securities depository.