The association will be made up of the Bank of England, Bank of Canada, BOE, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Riksbank and the Swiss National Bank, along with the Bank for International Settlements. The group will assess CBDC use cases, economic, functional and technical design choices, including cross-border interoperability, and the sharing of knowledge on emerging technologies.

Still, absent from the group is the People’s Bank of China, which is poised to become the first major central bank to issue a digital version of its currency, according to Bloomberg. The debate around such a currency intensified with Facebook’s announcement to create a digital currency, Libra, back in 2019, plus Mark Carney’s, BOE Governor, proposal for an overhaul of the global financial system, and ECB policy makers, under the new leadership of Christine Lagarde, who have already discussed the idea of issuing their own digital currency.

Christine Lagarde has long argued that central banks should consider the merits of such developments, which she believes include public goals such as financial inclusion, consumer protection and payment privacy.