French banks on Tuesday called on future members of the European Commission to guarantee the capacity to finance the continent’s future needs, and not to compete their commercial offers with a digital euro managed by the European Central Bank (ECB).
These priorities are essential to ensure the sustainable transformation of the economy and to not miss – due to lack of sufficient European funding – the industrial revolutions that constitute the digital and ecological transitions. The autonomy of the European Union is at stake, declared Maya Atig, general director of the French Banking Federation (FBF), in a press release.
These demands appear in a document bringing together the priorities defined by the lobby of French banks, which will be presented in Brussels on Wednesday, with the approach of the elections on June 9 aimed at renewing the composition of the European Parliament for the period 2024-2029.
To ensure the financing of the economy, the FBF is calling for the ECB’s digital euro project to be revised in order to maintain the capacity of the banking sector to finance the economy.
The ceiling of a digital euro wallet should correspond to current everyday uses, i.e. 100 euros based on average withdrawals from ATMs, and any holding and transaction in digital euro should go through existing banking applications, judges- She.
To support the explosion of dematerialized payments, and prevent this craze from taking advantage of private virtual currencies, the ECB is working on issuing a bank account in digital euros. Commercial banks are concerned about individuals moving their deposits to a central bank currency account. In addition, a consortium bringing together 16 banks and payment players is already developing a payment solution with very similar use cases, called the European Payments Initiative (EPI).
Furthermore, to facilitate the movements of capital and liquidity, and for Europe to become a truly competitive single market, French banks are asking to review certain rules relating to the resolution of banking crises, in particular the threshold for applying the requirements of equity and liabilities eligible for internal bailout in the event of bank resolution.