The launch of the digital euro could give every European a free, universal payment account. But this grand vision is at risk of being curtailed by a well-coordinated lobbying campaign of the banking industry. Banks want to make sure you will keep needing them – and they have EU officials’ ears.
This is confusing, doesn’t EU mandate a free / basic tier of banking account already? And isn’t pretty much every currency digital too?
Public payment processor is a pipe dream though. Someone has to do AML, insurance. Free wire transfers are subsidized by other revenue streams.
It technically could be subsidized by taxes. Not saying if that’s good or bad.
There’s a catch here. Large amount of AML regulations imposed on banks is an indirect form of taxation, even if it wasn’t the original goal. Banks have to do bulk of investigative work that makes sense to do there. To do that they have to employ crapload of people (in Poland, Hungary, Estonia etc). I’m not sure individual governments or EU want to get into that because they could turn out to be less competitive than private sector which has no qualms with outsourcing / offshoring as much as possible.