Payments in Sweden 2020

International cooperation on central bank digital currency

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The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating work

Published: 29 October 2020

The central banks in the group are agreed that it is urgent to make progress in this work now and that this is due, to an even greater extent than previously, to the crisis that the coronavirus pandemic has triggered. This has led to cash being abandoned, to some extent, in favour of digital payment alternatives, even in countries where cash had previously held a stronger position than in Sweden. As a consequence of this, central banks in these countries have also accelerated the work of modernising their payment systems. In the autumn, the President of the ECB, Christine Lagarde, held a speech in which, like the Riksbank, she warned of the potential risks of digitalisation and argued that central banks must actively take a stance on this development.