On August 9, the Bank of England announced that they will be recruiting researchers for the new academic advisory group as the country is moving to the design phase of digital currency (CBDC). The BoE created the CBDC Academic Advisory Group (the AAG) with HM Treasury – the government’s finance arm.
The AAG will bring together experts from a range of disciplines related to the BOE’s work on the digital pound and will be jointly run by the Bank of England and HM Treasury.
The AAG will serve as a platform for knowledge exchange and research collaboration. The group will consist of experts from the fields of monetary policy, finance, competition economics, industrial organisation, behavioural science, law, innovation theory, marketing, and business.
The BoE and Treasury launched a Consultation Paper for an assessment of the motivation and design choice for a potential digital pound in February 2023.
While no decision has been made, the country introduced the CBDC and said that “a digital pound is likely to be needed in the future.” BoE stated that the digital pound is likely to be needed in the future, so our work will now move onto a ‘design phase.’
BoE also explained the objective of the design phase, “to develop a comprehensive and conceptual architecture, and to carry out experimentation and proofs of concept, in collaboration with private sector innovators, to inform the development of our potential architecture and to build both the Bank’s and the private sector’s digital currency technology know-how.”
The CBDC Academic Advisory Group will be a platform for knowledge and research exchange, it will not have any decision-making responsibilities. “Through this group, we seek to generate expert academic input and promote interdisciplinary discussions on a range of topics related to retail CBDC,” the BoE said on its website.
The bank has started soliciting responses from stakeholders regarding use cases for offline payments and what merchants will want from the CBDC.
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