为了实现这些好处，任何央行数字货币的推出都必须伴随着政策改革和保障措施，以解决潜在的困难和风险，如低水平的金融和数字知识，以及包括网络安全在内的运营挑战。政策改革还应该防止“金融脱媒”：即资金大量存在央行数字货币钱包中，而不是作为商业银行的存款，使其无法用于贷款（如抵押贷款）和其他生产目的的危险。

中央银行还应该考虑设计央行数字货币，以实现公平竞争。让人们能够控制他们的交易数据，并能够与更多的金融服务提供商分享数据。对数据隐私日益增长的担忧可以通过在央行数字货币的结构中硬性规定个人数据保护来解决。

探索建立央行数字货币的中央银行将有许多设计选择，以平衡隐私保护和透明度，并确保金融包容性和金融完整性。他们将需要考虑是让消费者直接使用，还是采用纯粹的中介模式，通过银行或非银行金融服务提供商提供央行数字货币数字钱包。

中央银行家和其他公共部门的代表有责任确保金融系统的包容性、开放性、竞争性，并对所有群体的需求和利益做出反应。

作者 | Agustin Carstens，BIS总裁

英文原文如下：

CBDCs for the People

Op-ed by Mr Agustín Carstens, General Manager of the BIS, and H.M. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development, published by Project Syndicate, 18 April 2022.

THE HAGUE and BASEL – Central banks around the world are considering whether to issue their own digital currencies. While financial inclusion is often cited as a key motivation, this is not automatic. Precisely how can central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) be designed and implemented to ensure that "unbanked" people have access to essential financial services?

According to the World Bank, 1.7 billion adults worldwide are unbanked. With no access to services from the formal financial sector, they are forced to resort to alternatives, often at significant cost or risk. Such financial exclusion entrenches poverty, limits opportunity and prevents people from protecting themselves against hardship. It stifles hope for a better future.

Financial inclusion starts, but does not end, with the ability to make and receive payments. People need a fast, secure, and cheap way to transfer money. To date, central banks have largely met this need by providing the most inclusive form of money we currently have: cash. However, using cash exclusively leaves the unbanked outside the formal financial system and without the data and transaction trail needed to readily access financial services. This can make it much more difficult for small businesses to build savings and gain access to credit.

But due to the widespread adoption of digital and mobile technologies, the payments landscape is changing. Cash transactions are declining, and there is a shift toward digital activity – a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, when online transactions surged. Given these broad developments, it is imperative that we work to close the widening digital divide. Central banks and policymakers now have an opportunity to explore reforms, including the issuance of digital central bank money for all.

CDBCs could offer an opportunity to overcome some barriers facing the unbanked. Traditional services have potentially prohibitive costs and requirements such as transaction fees, minimum account balances, or formal proof of identification. Additional obstacles include the low level of trust in digital payments and the lack of smartphones among some groups.

While CBDCs are not the only way to overcome these barriers, they could be part of the inclusion toolkit. Central banks are already coordinating further improvements to retail payments by adopting fast payment systems, and CBDCs represent a natural extension of this continuum. Both fast payment systems and CBDCs can spur competing providers to offer new services, lower costs, and, ultimately, broaden access. A further benefit of CBDCs is that, by their very nature, they will incorporate the unique advantages of central-bank money – safety, finality, liquidity, and integrity.

CBDCs could bypass many of the vested commercial interests that have cropped up around payment systems and contributed to inefficiencies and costs for users. They could also lower costs by removing the credit and liquidity risks inherent in other forms of digital money. A CBDC has the potential to upgrade and connect payment systems – both domestically and across borders. It could spur countries with limited financial infrastructure to leapfrog directly to a CBDC arrangement, creating an opportunity to connect to an inclusive, safe, and efficient payments system.

There are also benefits for social policies. For example, governments could use CBDCs to channel financial support to low-income households, which would deepen longer-term inclusion and act as another gateway to other financial services.

To realize these benefits, any CBDC rollout must be accompanied by policy reforms and safeguards to address potential difficulties and risks, such as low levels of financial and digital literacy, and operational challenges, including cybersecurity. Policy reforms also should prevent disintermediation: the danger that money will be held in large amounts in CBDC wallets, rather than as deposits in commercial banks, making it unavailable for lending (such as mortgages) and other productive purposes.

Central banks also should consider designing CBDCs to level the playing field. Give people control over their transaction data and the ability to share it with a wider set of financial service providers. Growing concerns aboutdata privacy could be addressed by hardwiring personal data protections into the structure of a CBDC.

Central banks exploring CBDCs will have many design choices to make to balance privacy protection and transparency, and to ensure both financial inclusion and financial integrity. They will need to consider whether to grant direct access to consumers or to use a purely intermediated model that offers CBDC digital wallets through banks or nonbank financial service providers. More dialogue, research, and trials will be needed to show how CBDCs can best become engines of financial inclusion.

Central bankers and other public-sector representatives have a duty to ensure the financial system is inclusive, open, competitive, and responsive to the needs and interests of all groups. If designed properly, CBDCs hold great promise to help support a digital financial system that works for everyone.

H.M. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands is the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development. Agustín Carstens is General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements.

编译：李淼

本文监制：董熙君

版面编辑 刘嘉璐

责任编辑 蒋旭、李锦璇

总监制 朱霜霜

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