 Welcome from my side to this session on new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement. My name is Ulrich Binsleil again and I'm the Director General of Market Infrastructures and Payments in the ECB. Our Directorate acts as operator overseer and catalyst and one of the basic tasks that we have is to promote the smooth operation of payment systems which is even in the statutes of the ECB, so in the EU Treaty and settlement in central bank money which is the most safe and risk-free asset and liquid asset is a cornerstone of payments and the smooth operation of payment system and that we believe holds both in the wholesale and in a certain sense also in the retail space. And as central bank we have the privilege to be able to issue central bank money and to offer it in systems in which it can be transferred for straight payments but also for example for delivery versus payment in T2S. So we offer T2S, the RTGS system T2S allowing for DVP settlement in central bank money and HIPPS as a retail payment settlement system 24-7 instantaneous settlement. We also as you know have a project on digital euro which would be electronic central bank money for retail purposes and as a digital euro project illustrates in the retail payment space we try to look into the future and you know think on how the forms of central bank money can remain fit for purpose for the future. If central bank money would not be fit for purpose any longer one day and because maybe we would stick exclusively to a technology which is no longer demanded then it would be used less and less and we may end up in a system in which central bank money is marginal and the architecture of the monetary system would become unstable. I mean some people say that retail CBDC is not needed because there are convenient electronic payment solution you know by the private sector but let's not forget private money is today a convertibility promise into central bank money so this convertibility promise into central bank money holds the monetary system together. You know we are not in the times of the gold standard any longer in which you know you can say it's a universal convertibility promise into gold everything is a convertibility promise today into central bank money that's the only anchor of the monetary system and the test of convertibility that is inherent to private money needs to be a real one a continuous one and not an abstract one that can be forgotten because central bank money would no longer be used and yeah in the case of retail CBDC again we only offer so far retail central bank money in the form of bank notes so sometimes I say half joking that this is 17th century technology some people say that retail CBDC is not needed again so then I say okay you want the central bank to stick to 17th century technology only why would the central bank be the only one who should do that so that's the debate on retail CBDC in the space of wholesale central bank money things are a bit different I mean there we have electronic money for quite a while for I don't know 50 years 80 years but there's a discussion on DLT for a few years in the field of financial markets of settlement and many believe that DLT is very promising and DLT contains a word distributed ledger and in our name there's a word central central bank so how does distributed and central go together question mark so is maybe the merit of DLT for central bank money less obvious but of course if DLT ecosystems develop in financial markets then the question arises you know what is the payment leg where does the payment leg come from and the payment leg would presumably could be integrated into a DLT ecosystem or is integrated in the form of something like stable coins but if this sort of ecosystem would over time become very large very relevant then the question reemerges how to ensure the key role of central bank money so how to bring together the word of central bank money and of DLT based financial market infrastructures at least someday in the future in this scenario that DLT indeed holds its promises and becomes more and more important so that's the context of the exercise we are doing and we are presenting today so we can go to the next slide so we are investigating concretely how central bank money settlement can take place in the context of DLT being used and there we had established a market contact group which is chaired by Horger Neuhaus who will be one of the subsequent speakers and there we had set up a dialogue to understand the market needs really in this field so there was an exercise of collecting input and yeah that was the first step understanding what markets believe is there in terms of DLT wholesale financial market infrastructures coming and secondly what is the role of central bank money and what are the preferences wishes of the market towards central bank money availability and that also this demand this also became relevant in the context of the DLT pilot regime where one could also you know ask how can we in this context offer central bank money to make experiments or tries more meaningful and yeah so if we move to the next slide so the question is of course how do you bring again together this world of central bank money and DLT and here we you know came up and that's not very creative it's just the different combinations you can imagine but with five different possibilities and the two on the left of this slide are the ones where the money leg remains on a central ledger basically and there we have two approaches one is that the central ledger is basically T2 and the other one is that it is sort of tips related hash link as it is called and it as it will be explained in much more detail in this session so here you combine basically central a central ledger with DLT and on the other side outside the central bank and you have to link the two of course in an effective manner and safe manner the other approaches on the right side of the slide all also rely on DLT for the central bank money leg and there are three possibilities in principle one is what we call interoperability that there are two basically DLT platforms one in the central bank money and the other ones in containing what the operator of the DLT allows on them and the two interact through some interoperability mechanism reserving the benefits of DLT by making this interoperability of course fully effective and that's one possibility the other one is we have an integrated approach where the central bank controls establishes the DLT platform in which not only central bank money is but also other assets so that has of course the advantage of integration but puts a lot of burden on the central bank because it takes basically both sides and on the asset side there could be a lot of diversity and complexity to manage and the last approach is basically that you put the central bank money on a DLT run by other parties and that could be permissioned blockchains or permissionless ones even in Siri so then you can see that we highlight here three out of the five approaches because we don't in the forthcoming tries and experiments offer all five we only offer the three which are highlighted so not the second and third one on the right side and we are progressing we are very concrete now in our plans so next year from May to November we will focus on those what we call interoperability type solutions the two on the left the one the upper one on the right of the previous slide and we will have experiments and tries experiments are defined as mock settlements on the cash side and test environments so while tries are actual settlement of transaction central bank money in the production environment at a limited scale however and for a limited period of time to allow to control it more closely and I think yesterday we published the expression of interest the call sorry the call for expression of interest you have to express interest and register using this link and the templates which are there and then there may be there will be a process I mean there have been eligibility criteria and of course we cannot fully anticipate the extent of demand so we will see if we can satisfy all the demands or if there is a capacity constraints clicking in somewhere then we will see how to handle this and yet just as a caveat at the end the euro systems exploratory work does not constitute a commitment by the euro system to provide such a solution in production in the future and to change the current infrastructure so there is a you know policy work to take place there is there would be decisions that would have to be taken this is really and and those let's say analysis of what could eventually become a project one day and become a reality one day it's a discussion also that to to be undertaken this discussion I would say in parallel to experiments and tries that we will do because obviously we need to understand better the technicalities the technical constraints the feasibility in parallel to understanding further what is eventually the role that we may want to implement for such solutions in the future I think that brings me to the end of my introductory remarks so thank you for your attention