The digital euro: Political ambitions and economic realities

Machine learning, with all of their processing power, they’re able to more quickly highlight or find patterns in big data that would have otherwise been missed by human beings. Machine learning is a tool that can be used to enhance humans’ abilities to solve problems and make informed inferences on a wide range of problems, much wider than financial services for example helping diagnose diseases to coming up with solutions for global climate change. [more]

The competition for global AI leadership is speeding up. But it already seems to be a two-horse race between the US and China. Europe faces an imminent risk of falling far behind if the EU and its members do not react rapidly and boldly. This could have broad implications for Europe's competitiveness, future wealth and political stability. The Commission's recently published White Paper on AI and its communication on a European strategy for data are crucial steps to formalise the debate on addressing the AI challenge in Europe. While the EU's strategy goes in the right direction, several points need to be clarified, in particular regarding the investment gap towards the US and China, finding the right balance between regulation and competitiveness of the EU's AI industry, and data access for AI research. [more]

This piece is the third in a series of three pieces that examines the past, present, and future of the payments industry. We analyse the unexpected results of our proprietary survey of 3,600 customers across the US, UK, China, Germany, France and Italy and forecast trends in cash, online, mobile, crypto, and blockchain. The implications for customers and business are important; the potential macro and geopolitical consequences are profound. [more]

This piece is the second in a series of three pieces that examines the past, present, and future of the payments industry. We analyse the unexpected results of our proprietary survey of 3,600 customers across the US, UK, China, Germany, France and Italy and forecast trends in cash, online, mobile, crypto, and blockchain. The implications for customers and business are important; the potential macro and geopolitical consequences are profound. [more]

When people discuss the future of payments they tend to predict the end of cash. Our view is different. Not only do we think cash will be around for a long time, we see the transition to digital payments as having the potential to do no less than rebalance global economic power. [more]

Deutsche Bank Research presents video on urgent digital policy issues. [more]

The digital transformation has enriched societal discourse through new forms of multilateral communication, but it has also amplified the spread of misinformation, echo chambers and propaganda, offering authoritarian states new means of surveillance and control. How democracies approach this challenge will be a key factor in their performance, given intensifying competition among political systems. [more]

Facebook’s Libra project aims to establish both a private digital currency backed by a basket of hard currencies and a global payment network. It is thus challenging many established players in the financial system, including central banks, credit institutions and payment providers. Facebook can integrate Libra services into its digital platforms and benefit from strong network effects. In Europe, Libra would enter a competitive but fragmented digital payments market. As a currency, Libra will carry a foreign exchange risk for Europeans. But if the ECB drove interest rates deeply below zero, Libra could offer an easy digital way out. The flipside, though, would be a loss of sovereignty for Europe. [more]

By providing a high degree of privacy in payments, cash helps to slow the growing information asymmetry between consumers and companies as well as between citizens and public authorities. As knowledge about your counterparty is power, privacy is crucial for individuals to safeguard their position when dealing with organisations which are more powerful than a single person. [more]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a significant step forward in the digitalisation and transformation of modern businesses. Investors are lining up to be part of the imminent change. AI attracted USD 24 bn in investments globally in 2018, a twelvefold increase since 2013. Within Europe, Germany, France and the UK are the frontrunners in experimentation and in the implementation of AI. Similar to earlier examples of information technology (IT) implementation in financial services, AI promises great efficiency gains and potential revenue increases and its potential contribution to bank profitability should not be underestimated. [more]

Digital taxation is currently a subject of intense debate and since large digital companies are widely thought to pay inappropriately low taxes, policymakers remain under pressure to act. However, all approaches which are based on the taxation of revenues instead of profits have major flaws. As digital services expand into ever new areas of the economy (‘smart everything’), the risk of a far-reaching, arbitrary taxation of entrepreneurial activities is increasing. Disruption, the buzzword of the digitalisation discussions, may become an issue in international tax policy, too. In addition to an (international) digital tax, minimum taxes are one of the concepts under discussion. [more]

In the competition for global leadership in technologies like artificial intelligence, most observers see a two-horse race – between China and the United States. But what about Europe? Can it ever catch up to the galloping favorites? It won’t be easy. The digital economy in the United States has big advantages: a large domestic market, a risk-taking investment culture, and plenty of innovative companies and world-class universities. US tech giants were first-movers out of the gates, and used the network effects of the platform economy to dominate not only the US, but many other markets worldwide. [more]