From Responses to the Bank of England’s Discussion Paper on new forms of digital money, 24 March 2022
The Bank has set up the CBDC Engagement and Technology forums, where relevant stakeholders from industry, civil society and academia provide strategic and technical input to the work on CBDC. The Bank and HM Treasury have also initiated the joint CBDC Taskforce to coordinate the exploration of a potential UK CBDC.
In 2022, the Bank and HMT will launch a consultation which will set out their assessment of the case for a UK CBDC, including the merits of further work to develop an operational and technology model for a UK CBDC. The 2022 consultation will inform a decision on whether the authorities are content to move into a ‘development’ phase which would span several years. A technical specification would follow the consultation explaining the proposed conceptual architecture for any CBDC. This could involve in-depth testing of the optimal design for, and feasibility of, a UK CBDC.
If the results of a ‘development’ phase conclude that the case for CBDC is made, and that it is operationally and technologically robust, then the earliest date for launch of a UK CBDC would be in the second half of the 2020s.
The full paper is available at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/paper/2022/responses-to-the-bank-of-englands-discussion-paper-on-new-forms-of-digital-money