 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's seminar at Digital Euro for Everyone. My name is Ronan Sheridan and I am delighted to be your moderator today. Ever since we launched the Digital Euro project, the ECB has been identifying the appropriate design options to provide Europeans with a stable, safe and convenient digital currency. In October this year, the Government Council of the European Central Bank will decide whether to move on to the next phase of the project. And as we approach this date, we're working together with a variety of stakeholders to deliver new findings. It's important to us to regularly engage with you as representatives of civil society to both understand your views on the Digital Euro and also to provide a progress update and to share with you future plans. So it's our pleasure to be here with you once again to discuss all things Digital Euro. Now just a couple of housekeeping rules before we get started. Please keep your microphones muted unless you're speaking. We encourage you to turn on your cameras even when you're not speaking as we hope this will enrich the debate and make for a more interactive environment. Please be aware that this seminar is being recorded and will be published on our ECB website in the coming days. And finally, if you have technical problems, please just type host in the chat box and a member of our team will assist you right away. So now to our panel of speakers. Eveline Whitlocks here on my right is leading the Digital Euro project at the ECB and Ignacio Terral is the product manager of the Digital Euro project. The presentation today will be split into two parts. And after each part there will be a Q&A session. So firstly, the focus will be on the need to have a Digital Euro under the recent legislative proposal. And the second part of the presentation will then focus on the agreed design and plan for the Digital Euro project. So now with that I leave the floor over to you. Eveline. Thank you very much, Ronan. And thank you very much for those joining today. It's a pleasure to interact with you on the Digital Euro. So today I will first talk on two topics, which is briefly on the legislative proposal that has just been published. And then on more the why of the Digital Euro, we have discussed this more often, but we feel this is still important to exchange views on. Then there is room for questions after that. And then later we will, Nacho will talk on the what. So on the legislative framework. So in a nutshell. So what we have seen is that there are changing payment behaviors and declining use of cash and an increasing usage of payment solutions. So if you look to the legislative proposal, we see that the objective is to ensure citizens and businesses access to central bank money in a digital age. And therefore there is this proposal, which is a draft published by the European Commission on the 28th of June, which would be a legislative framework for a retail Digital Euro. So if we look to this proposal, we of course from the ECB, we really welcome this proposal. If you can see on the slide our board member Fabio Permaneta has said that this is key to ensure that the Digital Euro brings value to the people taking the appreciated value features of cash into the digital age. And if we look to the proposal, we find a couple of points very important. First of all, that it gives a legal tender status across the Euro area. And with that we can ensure that like banknotes the Digital Euro will be accessible and usable throughout the Euro area for all citizens. We also see that the legislative proposal supports a high degree of privacy while it minimizes the money laundering and terrorist financing risks. It also states that the basic services should be free of charge and that there should be appropriate economic incentives for intermediaries to distribute it. And this is important so that we can ensure that the Digital Euro users are served well, of course, by their intermediaries. The legislative proposal also says that there should be an online and an offline variant of the Digital Euro, which we have been discussing for a longer time already. And last but not least, it foresees that there will be holding limits, which will make sure that we maintain a good balance between on one side bank deposits and on the other side central bank money. Questions we get a lot is how can on one side there be still the legislative proposal on the table and on the other side there is the governing council decision potentially to move to a next stage in autumn of this year. A couple of things that we want to stress again is that a decision to issue will only be taken by the governing council once the Digital Euro legislation is adopted. What we will do in parallel, and that will be the proposal that will go to the governing council, is that we will further prepare an experiment to be as ready as possible for a potential next phase. And of course throughout the process we will keep a close eye on how the legislative proposal and the legislation in the end will develop to make sure that when we decide to issue a Digital Euro that it will be of course fully in line with the legislation. So let me now turn to an important element of the debate on the Digital Euro and is why would we need a Digital Euro? So there are three items and reasons that we keep highlighting which are the main reasons for the ECB, the Euro system to contemplate to issue a Digital Euro. First, and I touched upon that already briefly, there is the evolution of money. What we see is that there is a decline in the usage of cash and that people have far bigger appreciation of digital payments. So more and more payments we do digitally and also when asked people give a preference for digital payments. So we need to make sure that we have a public money that will continue to support the citizens. We also see that it would make your life easier and that has more to do with the wide usability and accessibility through the Euro area, but I will go a little bit deeper in the next slides. And then last but not least, we believe that the Digital Euro will increase the resilience of the Euro area. So let me now zoom in on the first one, which is the evolution of money. And we believe that cash and a Digital Euro should be stronger together. So what we see, as I explained before, that there is a preference for paying digitally. However, we also notice and have taken note that people really like the option of cash to be there. So we also stay committed to cash. And we might come back to that at the end of this presentation. So what we believe is that also a Digital Euro could as a public good preserve the valued characteristics of cash. So it will not be one-on-one the same as cash because it's a different environment, but some valued characteristics we think we can bring to the Digital Age. And last but not least, we are the Euro area. We share the same currency and a Euro is a Euro also when we pay digitally. And that currently is not always the case. And that brings me to the other element that we say making your life easy. So the Digital Euro will not be mandatory. It will be an option for the payer. But what we want to make sure that this option stays there. So we have this option now in the current world so you can pay either with money provided by commercial parties or you pay with cash, which is a central bank money. And we believe going to the Digital Age it's important that this option will be there. We believe that with the Digital Euro we can make the life of people easier because the Digital Euro will be always accessible and always accepted. And it will be the only single European digital means of payments that will be accepted throughout the Euro area. You might all recall experiences where you could either not pay with your digital means or payment and that you had to refer to other solutions. And very important, this option will be free for basic use like it is with cash. Then last but not least, the resilience of the Euro area. We believe a Digital Euro will be reliable money no matter what. And with the Digital Euro we believe we can increase the resilience. Everyday payments are an essential service for people and the well-functioning of the economy. You never think about whether you can pay or not because you trust that you can pay. But maybe you can remember electricity outages or any other kind of problems where you could not pay. Very quickly this becomes very inconvenient for yourself and for the economy as a whole. Another point is that the Euro system will make sure that nobody is left behind. So since the Digital Euro will be public good we will be committed to make sure that everybody can move to a digital age and can pay there with the right to privacy maintained. And then last but not least, currently Europe is depending highly on external providers for digital payments. And we believe it's important that we have a pan-European solution for Europe. And then in short, let me summarize some value added of the Digital Euro. So first, and I mentioned it before, we would foresee that there would be offline payments that would be possible. We also will strive to make more digital and financial inclusion and also the legislation will support that. We will build the Digital Euro to make sure that there will be easier and faster online payments. As I said before, privacy is extremely important so we will make sure that we have the highest level of privacy that we can provide. And mainly with offline we think we can provide really a level of privacy which is close to the level of privacy with cash. We believe that with having a public good into the system it will maintain a right equilibrium and making sure since payments is a network product that there is sufficient competition so that this will make sure that there are cheap, efficient digital payments for merchants and if they are there for merchants it in the end always pays back for the consumers. And last but not least, you will be always able to pay when you travel. And with that I would like to close for now and hand back to Ronan for questions. Thank you very much, Eveline. Indeed a lot of information there so hopefully you have some questions that you would like to share or points you would like to make and share with Eveline and Ignatio. So maybe what we will do is we will take your questions maybe together and then Eveline can address them. So if anyone has a first question they would like to raise please just raise your virtual hand and then we would ask you to maybe just mention what organization you are coming from as well so that we can address you directly as well. So yeah as I say we have a lot of a good number of people on the call today so really it would be really nice if we start to get the questions and then we can pull them as I say and then put them to Eveline. So I think that both those hands went up almost exactly at the same time so maybe from top down so I see one from Adela Dalla-Costa perhaps you could unmute please and ask your question. Hi yes I'm Adela Dalla-Costa from Positive Money Europe. First of all thanks a lot for organizing this seminar it's always very much appreciated. I have a question concerning the holding limits to the digital euro account so in the commission proposal Adela has allocated to the ECB the task of establishing a holding limit for financial stability purposes so my question would be how are you going to determine this this limit are you going to like is it going to be a research-based kind of decision and so far we were not aware of any research indicating any risk of financial stability due to no holding limits for digital euros so I was wondering if as part of your research are you also going to explore a holding limit for digital euros to consider in your final decision thanks. Thanks Adela thank you very much we also have a question then from Rens van Tilburg Rens please go ahead Yes thank you very much and thank you for organizing this call I'm from the sustainable finance lab from the Netherlands and I have a roughly similar question the easy question would be you refer that there should be a good balance between deposit and digital euro so what criteria are you thinking about to decide what is good in that sense and a more specific question is do you have a static or a dynamic view on that in the sense that if there is a financial crisis or the fear of a financial crisis would then that balance shift which I think with looking at consumer preferences it does so there will be a push then to if there is a certain limit and if that limit is not very high from people to have more digital euros how do you would like to go about with that and I would say the background for my question is that with the sustainable finance lab we have actually made an analysis in 2018 where we said it would actually be good if we would have something which is also a store of value digitally with the central bank actually as an incentive for commercial banks to finance themselves in a more stable way so that it would actually in a dynamic way be financial stability and housing but of course there is a transition question here and would it as we would say like you should in the end have a rather a high limit but grow towards that gradually and what we think is sort of like the worst overall so you can have is that you have a very low limit which then is increased in times of stress all of a sudden so very curious how you would look at that thank you thank you very much so any additional questions that's too so far any more questions people would like to ask in this round great Tristan please ask your question yes thank you very much I'm Tristan Dissaut from the University of Brussels and Fabienne Institute my question concerns the offline version of the digital euro could you say a bit more about it as the most inclusive and most privacy enhancing offline digital euro would be a non-identified digital euro so a true bearer instrument in the same way as you don't need to be identified to use cash and to hold cash so would this offline digital euro offer the same the same qualities of cash in terms of not needing to be identified to to use it thank you thank you very much so any additional questions before we hand over to Eberlin one more Rens a new one go ahead yes if time allows then I have because it is a bit of a burning question with me as I said we've been working on the idea of digital euro since 2018 and there was not much enthusiasm for that at that time from central banks which of course really changed the moment that Facebook came with the Libra idea which I think shows to an extent that the real reason why we're talking about the digital euro is the fear at that moment that somehow the payment system would would be controlled by other organizations than commercial banks or the central bank but what actually commercial organizations from outside of the eurozone and that is something that I don't see back in any of the I don't think so in any of the reasons that we've just been listed as to why we have a digital euro and I've been in the Netherlands I've been a lot on the in the conversations in the Dutch media of the last couple of weeks as to why do we need a digital euro and in the Netherlands where we have a good electronic payment system a lot of people are saying why do we actually need this because we have all the pros that the ECB just listed we already have them in the Netherlands and I've been trying to sort of like bring to the table that there's actually a really big problem if we would all need to be paying with Facebook coins so to say but the fact that the ECB is not putting that as a reason to see reasons on the table I think it makes it harder also to well to make the case for the digital euro in a quite digitalized financial environment like the Netherlands so yeah my question how do you look at this reason and is this something that the ECB could communicate as well thank you Great well Reims thanks very much for that so I'm conscious as well of balancing that we have enough time to address the questions we've gained as well so perhaps with that I'll hand over to Evelyn I think somebody needs to mute again perhaps thank you Thank you very much, thank you for the questions and your interest let me start with the questions around the holding limits so a couple of questions were asked so first on how will you determine this holding limit and has any research been done so first of all some research has been done already so we have been going out on on the basis of some research that we have done that we believe that with a holding limit of around 3.000 euros there would be no impact or concern for financial stability having said that we have always said and we will keep saying that that the holding limit will be decided only much closer to issues because then we can take much better into account the economic situation at that point in time that would also entail that if the council would decide to go to a next phase that will allow us more time for further research and interaction with the market to make sure that we have also addressed some concerns around the holding limits then on the question that Rens asked on whether it's stable or dynamic the attention is that it is as stable as possible so not that we would decide every other month to change the holding limit it's really something that should be stable and the holding limit is also there just to avoid that in time of crisis there would be a big outflow of liquidity in the bank in one go so it would not be a logic conclusion to change the holding limit in a time of crisis and I just want to flag maybe not for this audience but other audience are very concerned about that is that of course with digital means of payments it's anyway relatively easy to move your money from one bank to the other so the digital euro will only marginally contribute to that risk then on the question from Christian on the offline digital euro and how it would look like Nacho will say a little bit more in the next phase part of the presentation what I can already say is that it would be indeed something like a bearer instrument which can be relatively or very private in the sense that transactions are only registered between the two devices that interact with each other it can be your mobile phone or a card what is currently not foreseen is that it's completely anonymous so this means that you need to open somewhere an account get your offline digital euro what could then be seen is the fact that you would upload digital euros to your device or that you defund it because you want it back on your account and that is very similar as what currently is there also for cash if you go to the ATM the bank knows that you have withdrawn whatever 100 euros or when you go back and you deposit 100 euros they will know but what they don't know is all the transactions that are there in between and a digital euro offline one could be technically designed exactly the same way but as said Natja will say a bit more in the next part then on the last question from Rens on the resilience sorry I already made the connection with the resilience so your argumentation indeed that we need to make sure that digital euro remains our unit of account or the euro remains our unit of account and that there is always the option for public money we are not fully dependent on commercial parties is very much one of the reasons of the resilience that we mentioned so this is about the resilience and independence from the current providers because you mentioned for example the Netherlands all the POS transactions are done on rails provided by non-European players just to make everybody aware but this also includes indeed the further development of parties like Facebook or others that could come in but also other CBDCs central bank digital currencies that could surface in the world so it is one of the argumentation and one of the reasons that we bring we bring this normally in relationship to the resilience one increasing our resilience with that I have answered the question but I see one hand raised exactly so I think we still have just two or three more minutes before we move on to the next presentation Martin Schmelzried, if you want to ask a question please go ahead Can you hear me? Yes So Martin Schmelzried from the COFSA Confederation of Family Organizations, Family Zero I just had a question clarification regarding I see a kind of a contradiction between your point about resilience and also the point about the limits on holding because I mean consumers have been denouncing the fact that there is a kind of too big to fail environment with banks and that some banks are counting on the fact that they're too big to fail and engage in risky moral hazard activities and the digital euro could actually be an instrument to actually support more responsible behavior because it wouldn't be as difficult to resolve these kind of bank failures if consumers can actually exit in case of a problem like we've seen in the US three major banks failing and many people being left completely naked without any kind of money losing all their money this is obviously I would think that a digital euro given your argument about resilience could definitely serve that kind of purpose to further stabilize the financial system and to serve as a sort of second kind of like a fallback in case there is a major kind of meltdown issue so do you foresee that kind of usage at some point and do you see that there's this kind of dual opposition between your argument about resilience and the holding limits thank you thank you for your question it's a multifaceted question I would say so let me start with the digital euro so the digital euro is mainly designed as a means of payment that doesn't mean that there is zero store of value that's why there is a holding limit but the main argumentation is a means of payment and to have a resilience related more to the payment so that's also what you see back and reflected into the design of course in the wider financial sector there are other safeguards put in place in order if something would go wrong with the bank that your deposits are secured to a certain level so we're not addressing the full of your concerns with the digital euro because as I said it's mainly designed as a means of payment with a limited store of value function sorry not sure do you want to add something yes I can compliment if you really see that the evolution of cash it's trying to preserve a very nice balance which has been existing for decades between deposits and cash in the sense that yes you can take all the money away from your bank account to have it in cash but that involves a certain if it's a significant amount of course it's a significant risk for you that you lose or that that cash is stolen so we want to preserve that balance and that balance implies that we need to factor in that risk and that cost which exists for everybody if you withdraw money from your bank account to take a significant amount of cash great thanks very much and so then let's move on to the second half of our time so the second presentation so we said at the start that our second presentation will focus on the agreed design and the plan for the digital euro project so with that we'll have a presentation from Ignatio for about 10 minutes and then we'll have a slide-off question and then we will have time for questions and answers and then we can wrap up so Ignatio over to you thank you very much Ronan the question will be actually to ask you on where you find the most valuable use case from these ones I'm presenting here so if you think about how people could use a digital euro in terms of where in terms of use cases so we see the possibility to do person to person payments to pay in physical stores and to pay in e-commerce as the day-to-day retail payments which we're all used to today we can use cash in person-to-person payments and in physical stores but not in e-commerce e-commerce is expanding so this would allow us to bring back an equilibrium in which central bank money can also be used in all fields of commerce you see here also with this sign the possibility to pay online and offline depending on the situations so of course you cannot pay offline on e-commerce just like you can't pay offline you can't pay in e-commerce with cash and we try to cover with this the diversity of needs of citizens in terms of actual form factor in terms of what you would use you could use a mobile phone or you could use a card so depending on the combinations that you see there you would be able to pay in person-to-person physical stores or in e-commerce let me take you now through how we would use digital euro accessible as a public good so the euro system would take the responsibility to issue the digital euro and since this would be the liability of the euro system it would be our ledger we would also need to take the responsibility for settling those payments supervised intermediary so payment service providers will distribute the digital euro they will manage their customer relationship as they do today so it would not be possible for anybody to go directly to the central bank just like today you don't go directly to the central bank for cash that's a customer relationship which is managed by the payment service provider according to the applicable law it would be important to have a smooth onboarding and simple access to users and for this purpose we are inviting but it's their option the various banks to provide mobile banking apps which would always which would be supporting digital euro payments in any case all banks should be supporting a new digital euro app where the app would be provided basically the underlying service is provided by each bank which is as per digital payments today validating each payment each online payment to do the necessary anti-money laundering counter-terrorism financing and fraud checks one key point that would be new with digital euro would be an easier way of providing of digital euro holdings from one provider to another today if you know this well if you change your mobile phone from one company to another you can take your mobile phone you don't need to change a mobile phone number to go from one provider to another with the I-Ban in the way in which it's designed the I-Ban includes a country code and includes a code moving from one bank to another you cannot take your I-Ban from one bank to another so we would ensure with a digital euro that easy porting so that it would not be a code which is a country or bank dependent which you could use so you would have easier flexibility to move from one payment service provider to another to provide you digital euro services let me address now Anita this graph tries to capture the online functionality and the offline functionality nicely complement each other with the online functionality as was shown in my initial slide you can cover all use cases person to person physical shops or e-commerce and offline functionality in contrast would only be available for proximity payments so you have to be in front of the person you're paying or in front of you have to be in a physical shop it would be so it's proximity and it would be as cash there would be a maximum limit set in this case by the commission just like also the maximum amounts of payments with cash are often limited so there would be in order to preserve exactly the same privacy versus AML balance which exists in cash an offline digital euro would bring this balance to the digital sphere and in that respect it would have the highest privacy level possible with the digital means of payment in so far as the payment would be taking place from one secure device in my mobile phone in my cart to the secure device which is in the hands of the payee so from that perspective just like today a payment with cash is only known to the payer and to the payee this payment with an offline digital euro would only be known to the payer and to the payee again like cash the money is in your secure device which means that if you would lose the mobile phone for example in which you have your secure device it's as if you lose your physical wallet where you hold your cash so it's really bringing replicating closer these cash features to the digital sphere to have the way cash in your mobile if I can put it in a very simple then one point where we had very valuable interactions with consumer right associations they brought us and I think to the commission as well the importance of facilitating digital inclusion not just financial inclusion but also digital inclusion if what is legal tender if what is the form of money issued by the central bank in the end the money of the union if that's brought to the digital sphere there is a consequent obligation of public authorities to facilitate that accessibility and one key point in the legislative proposal is that there will be dedicated entities in the various member states offering in-person so really face to face support for those who need help in using a digital application of course for those who would not still feel secure with a digital application the possibility to use physical cards should also be there as well as the possibility to allow funding and defunding via cash of course this accessibility we're speaking about public money so this accessibility to digital services should be facilitated free of charge and now I think we turn to Ronan for initiating. Yes, thanks Inazio thanks very much so as we mentioned a little while ago we have a slido question for you to answer Inazio already teed it up for us nicely so the question is about what is the most common use case for the digital euro that you can see or you can feel so the question should be there on the chat function and feel free to already think about answering that and then in the meantime if you already have questions that you want to raise following that presentation we'll do the same as we did for the first round we'll collect questions together so with that then perhaps then we hand over to Alexander who you have your hand raised Alexander please go ahead and ask your question Hello I'm Alexander Simic from the sustainable finance lab in the Netherlands I had two questions about the offline digital euro payments so one relates to the previous ones and that is what the limits would be to these the legislative proposal is not clear moreover it gives different powers to different entities to set these limits so offline holding limits would be set by the European Commission and online to the ECB this is not clear where this distinction comes from so I'm curious as to your explanation on this and then the second thing is of course there are no limits to holding cash and as this offline option is similar to cash as possible I'm wondering how you see setting this limit things Thank you very much so anybody and any additional questions at this point Tristan please go ahead ask your question Thank you my question concerns distribution of the digital euro and universal access to the digital euro in the European Union we already have the payment access directive which is supposed to guarantee the right to a basic payment account regardless of a personal financial situation in particular but we see that in many instances banks prevent people from accessing a back account mostly because they don't see customers as profitable enough so how could we ensure that digital euro services would be more inclusive in particular if we rely on private intermediaries as it's often emphasized in the current proposition so how can we have better results than with current provision of basic payment accounts Thank you Thank you very much so any additional questions I see Alexander you have your hand raised I assume that's not a new question thank you in case it was more than welcome to obviously ask another one Anybody else wants to ask a question at this stage and I see we have I think seven colleagues who have also responded to the slide open survey so really that's in case anyone else who wants to add their view to that please go ahead and if we don't have any additional questions then I think then we can at this point start to address the ones that we have received and of course we have still a bit of time for anyone who wants to ask any additional questions on this or anything they heard earlier as well so perhaps hand over to you Matthew Thank you for the question so Alexander on the question of the setting the limit as to what would be the maximum offline payments which is also connected to what's the maximum amount of detail you can hold offline so to clarify today with cash it's not the ECB which is setting what might be in different countries the maximum payment which can be done with cash because that entails a judgment of privacy versus anti-money laundering it's not a central bank decision it's a political decision and that's why at least in the legislative proposal it's proposed that that decision that equivalent of this maximum amount of a payment with cash that would lie with the European Commission to set it and then what is the overall holdings of digital euro because that's that's something which we do every day so the overall holding limit of a digital euro would be established by the ECB so let me take just one theoretical example what if the maximum the overall holding limit with a digital euro would be 3,000 while the maximum payment that you can do offline and therefore the maximum amount that you can hold offline would be 1,000 it would be in this case up to every user to configure within these parameters how they would like to better define depending on the use that they would want to make the use depending on the use they would make on the online of the offline how you would distribute the 3,000 so you could have you could decide to have everything just with your online you could decide to have 2,500 with the online 500 with the offline of course you would not be able to go as far as having 1,500 in the online and 1,500 with the offline because the maximum for the offline would be 1,000 so this would be a practical a practical example to reflect at least our understanding of what is brought in the legislative proposal on the question of the distribution of digital euro and universal access I think it's important to highlight in the legislative proposal that there is the obligation for every credit institution for every bank towards their customer to provide digital euro upon demand digital euro is also the all the services related all the basic services to enable their customers to use a digital euro shall be provided by banks upon demand then on top of that because then the question is so what happens for the unbanked on top of that and because there's if the form of money issued by the union becomes digital as I said there's an additional responsibility beyond what is established in the payment account directive to make this accessible to everybody in the union and that's why the legislation foresees that member states shall designate dedicated licensed entities it's what we call a public approach licensed entities to facilitate access to the digital euro for example for the unbanked of course let's say it's these entities will need to perform the necessary KY the necessary know your customer processes so there's everything which is to be done to avoid money laundering shall be established we don't want more fraud with the digital euro but there's a specific responsibility as I said for member states to designate entities in their countries to facilitate this access which is not existing in the in the path and also to facilitate the digital inclusion which I was mentioning earlier. Thank you very much for that. I see also a question from Christian Christian please go ahead and ask your question and then if we have time after that I notice from the Slido results that as well as person to person offline which I think that has already covered there was also a preference for e-commerce so perhaps we could touch on that if we still have a moment or two so Christian anyway please please go ahead and ask your question. Thank you. My question is regarding the distribution or in fact the remuneration model that's currently being proposed at first look this model seems to occupy a slightly awkward middle ground between cash on the one hand and private e-money on the other in that on the one hand it is cash like in that payment services providers are at least in the proposals prohibited from charging fees to retail customers emphasis here being on retail on the other hand it is very much similar to commercial private e-money payment services models where merchants are being charged which brings me to two questions one fundamental and one more practical the fundamental being if we are looking at the digital as the legal tender as the new electronic digital equivalent to cash it is not customary in fact to remunerate anybody for handling cash purely for the reason that it is the legal tender so why adopting a merchant fee model as opposed to effectively requiring payment services providers to handle digital euro transactions because it is the legal tender and because beyond the basic services the PADs the basic services which are not remunerated they can generate revenues from offering additional services so this is the fundamental question the practical question is although although payment service providers would not be allowed to charge fees to retail customers what is the perspective of the ECB on merchants passing on the merchant fees to retail customers would they be allowed to effectively sort of do to your price as is sort of the case with credit card payments currently and simply pass through the merchant fees thank you thank you very much, Nathaniel thank you for the good questions I think really the challenge here of the commission in the legislative proposal has been how to bring the concept of legal tender to the digital world already also in because there's been the parallel cash proposal in harmonizing the understanding of legal tender in the area so how to bring legal tender to the cash world and the basic safeguard which is established there is that on the one hand merchants who are accepting digital payments are required to accept digital euro which is what is enabling us to always have this option to pay but at the same point of time there's a safeguard there saying that merchants cannot be charged more than for comparable payment instruments so in a way with this safeguard the risk that the merchant would face higher acceptance costs because it is accepting digital euro would be in existent because it's ruled out by legislation so that fear that merchants would be having higher costs that they would pass on to consumers it's ruled out in the legislative proposal at the same time can you say merchants should not be having any acceptance costs well today with cash when merchants go to deposit of course merchants are normally getting more cash in than they have cash out so that cash in which they have they need to ultimately sooner or later deposit it in banks and that has a cost so I think again here also it's preserving a balance with also the fact that that cash has manipulation and security related costs finally also keep in mind that while in an offline digital euro that goes from secure device to secure device like cash there is no intervention of any bank of any payment service provider in an online payment banks will need to do the same fraud the same anti-money laundering checks as they are doing with other private digital payment private means digital means of payment so it's only fair also that they are reminerated in a similar way so this is this would be my my understanding of how the commission and it's a challenge to bring the concept of legal tender to the digital world it's a very delicate equilibrium and it's important to read from this perspective the legislative proposal carefully thanks very much Ignatio I mentioned earlier that if we had time we could just get any reactions from both of you either view on e-commerce being the top case but I think we stimulated enough conversation already but if you have anything to add Ignatio on that or any reaction to that or yes so I would see it in the context in which indeed cash is not today available in e-commerce so where is cash missing today that would be my reason to vote for e-commerce at the same time I'm also not surprised of the very close number of votes with offline digital euro because it's also what is more distinct to what is already existing today great thank you thank you very much for that so then we're coming to the end of our so before I wrap up maybe I just pass over to Evelyn in case you have any concluding remarks thoughts Evelyn thank you very much I will be brief just also to make sure that we stay in the timeline that was planned for but I want to thank you for your interest for these interactions we really value this very much we speak in this context we also speak some of you I've already spoken also face to face we really continue and Ronan will say a bit more but we would like for the digital euro to stay closely connected on the topics that are important for civil society in the broadest sense but for the end user because the digital euro is designed to bring value to the end users which is both the citizens as well as the merchants and it's important I believe when we are going to the next phase both in the design of the product as well as for the legislation to keep that very closely in mind that it's really for them that we're doing this so your contributions your input are very highly valued so thank you for being here with us thank you very much Evelyn so then maybe just before we finish up we do and if you remember the last sessions that we had similarly to this we would encourage you to answer a couple of questions in the feedback survey which is now or should be on your screen it really does help us to try and change how we engage a little bit to try and get as much out of this for you as we can so we really value any input there and as I say I just want to say thanks both to Evelyn and to Ignatio for the time and for their contributions and for sharing the updates that we've made and Evelyn has already thanked you indeed as well so maybe one other thing to do to take advantage of your attention at the moment we've mentioned a couple of times several times that digital euro is not meant to replace but to complement cash and we're very much committed to keeping cash available at ECB and in fact you may already be aware that we are currently working on a new design for euro banknotes in view of preventing counterfeiting and reducing environmental impact and continuing the innovation that is required for banknotes in circulation so we would invite you also to fill in our survey on our website to share your views on the seven different design themes which we are proposing as possible new themes for the banknotes design when it takes place so you can find a link in the chat and we would also be really grateful if you could share this link with your organizations as well the more views we have the better in terms of shaping the banknotes of the future so that's that then and just really to wrap up and say many thanks to everyone again we will be holding our next session our next seminar on banking supervision on the 18th of July and I think hopefully you have already received an invitation to that yesterday and we hope to see you there at that so with that I wish you all a very good evening and until next time thank you very much and goodbye