Five companies have been chosen by the European Central Bank (ECB) for helping it in developing the user interfaces required for a digital euro.
Every company will collaborate with the ECB and they would remain focused on one specific use case of the central bank digital currency (CBDC).
One of the companies that have been selected to be part of the project includes Amazon.com Inc., which will be focused on e-commerce payments.
Collaboration
The announcement from the European Central Bank (ECB) was made on Friday about its decision to collaborate with five companies on the digital euro project.
The goal is to develop some user interfaces that can be used with the currency.
According to the ECB, they are going to use this prototyping exercise to determine just how well they can integrate the technology behind the digital euro with the prototypes that these firms develop.
All of these companies will be collaborating with the ECB, but they will be focusing on different use cases for the digital euro.
The five companies that have been chosen for participation in this collaboration include Worldline, Caixabank, Nexi, EPI, and Amazon.
The companies
As mentioned earlier, the focus of the companies will be different in terms of use cases for the digital euro.
Worldline and Caixabank will be working on peer-to-peer online payments. As for Nexi and EPI, their focus will be on point-of-sale (POS) payments that the payer initiates.
As for Amazon, the e-commerce giant will obviously focus on e-commerce payments with the digital euro. The ECB chose these five companies from a total of 54 companies.
The monetary authority disclosed that they had chosen the five companies after matching their specific capabilities to the use case they wanted them to focus on.
The bank went on to say that the prototyping exercise was an essential part of the ongoing investigation phase of their central bank digital currency (CBDC) project that has been running for the past two years.
It further said that the phase would come to an end in the first quarter of the next year and they would then publish their findings.
The process
The ECB said that the five companies would develop front-end prototypes and they will initiate simulated transactions with them that will be processed via the back-end infrastructure and interface of the Eurosystem.
However, the monetary authority also clarified that the other phases of the digital project would not make use of any of these prototypes again.
The ECB had formally begun to look into its CBDC i.e. a digital euro last year in October and had disclosed that it would take two years for its investigation phase to complete.
In February, Christine Lagarde, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) said that they did not intend to replace cash with the digital euro, but wished to complement it.
She said that it would just provide users with another choice for making payments and make it easier, thereby ensuring inclusion and accessibility.