On May 24-25, Koba Gvenetadze, the Governor of the National Bank of Georgia, participated in the Euromoney’s Annual event Central and Eastern European Forum. The meeting was attended by investors, politicians, financiers and Central Bank Governors from different countries.

 

The Leader of the National Bank of Georgia took part in the Spotlight Session: Central bank digital currency: How and why? The NBG Governor spoke about the importance of digital currency, focusing on the actions taken by the National Bank of Georgia to develop the digital GEL.

 

“Financial inclusion can indeed be one of the advantages of CBDC. Current technologies allow much quicker scalability than traditional banking services, and there are ways also to operate CBDC. Hence it is easier to reach part of the population that is excluded. Though financial inclusion is not the main benefit of CBDC for Georgia. The value added of CBDC is in exploiting modern technologies in a way to make financial services more efficient, cheaper, and simpler for the end users and even to substitute some of the processes in non-financial sector, such as property registration for example. At the same time, I believe the main feature of these currencies that attract investors are its anonymity and speculative nature. While CBDCs on the other hand should offer greater transparency and more stability in value with the same, or similar, technology. For any asset to be qualified as money, it should offer store of value. It is obvious that central bank issued currencies offer greater reliability,” said Koba Gvenetadze.