Central bank digital currency and European banks’ balance sheets

The aim of this paper is to look at possible scenarios of demand for a retail-only euro central bank digital currency and assess their impact on bank’s balance sheets, to explore potential effects on bank’s intermediation capacity and financial stability. The European Central Bank, in the context of the Eurosystem investigative exercise, has tackled this issue by proposing a set of illustrative scenarios for the adoption of a Euro CBDC (see Adalid et al., 2022 and discussion therein). We expand their analysis to include more detailed results at country level by making use of individual banks data. For each demand scenario, we estimate the potential shock on deposits making use of MS-level data. We then apply these shocks at individual bank level and compare them to a set of alternative adjustment channels, including free reserves, wholesale funding and assets (deleveraging) to obtain a distribution of the ratio of shocks to different channels. Results show that per capita demand scenarios around 3 thousand euro do not seem to present risks for financial stability in the aggregate, though they present asymmetric impacts and could give raise to shifts in the structure of balance sheets and interbank markets.