is a long list of fundamental questions that need to be answered. let me give you a few examples. e - krona in an account? the first question is whether e - krona should be booked in accounts or whether the ekrona should be some form of digitally transferable unit that does not need an underlying account structure, roughly like cash. if we want an account structure, would the account be with the riksbank? if not, where would it be? 7 the world economic forum has an index, the network readiness index ( nri ), which ranks countries ’ conditions for making use of modern communication and network technologies. sweden has been among the top three countries in the world for the past ten years. 8 the banks have done so with swish. there is a competing service in seqr. izettle, another swedish company, has a service that converts your smartphone into a card terminal. there are several other innovative payment services on the market and under development. 9 there is a growing interest in this issue in the central bank world. for instance, the bank of england has begun to study this question, as has the bank of canada, see http : / / www. bankofengland. co. uk / publications / pages / speeches / 2016 / 886. aspx and http : / / www. bankofcanada. ca / 2016 / 06 / fintech - financial - ecosystemevolution - revolution / 7 in the first case, with accounts in the riksbank, the e - krona would be fairly similar to the central bank money that we currently have in our payment system. these e - krona would not be lost if, for instance, the consumer lost his or her telephone, if that is where they are stored. the amount of central bank money can also change rapidly and at the pace determined by the demand from the general public. it is possible, although it does not need to be the case, that this would make it more difficult for the riksbank to carry out the fine - tuning operations that we use to steer the short - term rate, that is, the starting point for interest - rate setting in sweden. if we instead have a digital unit that can be transferred decentralised between two people, other complications will arise. could such a solution be compatible with the regulations on counteracting money laundering and terrorist financing? how would we prevent digital units of value being copied, that is,

as the “ zero lower bound ” problem. 8 the issuing of e - krona together with a positive interest rate on e - krona could affect financial stability in the banking sector. today, the banking sector functions as a system of communicating vessels. if a consumer or a company withdraws money from a bank, this money comes into another bank, either as a deposit or as payment for a product or service. if the riksbank launches an e - krona with a positive interest rate, it can in some situations be very attractive for both the general public and companies to convert their account balances in the banks to e - krona with the riksbank. the banking system could then be drained of the funding for its lending, and become unstable, which could damage the supply of credit in the economy. in addition to the questions i have just mentioned, there are a number of other questions, such as technological solutions, consumer integrity and how a solution can be adapted to suite different groups in society. as you hear, i have only been able to take up a lot of questions here. i don't have all the answers. and i don ’ t think anyone else has at present. the only thing we can be fairly certain of is that whatever direction the riksbank chooses to take - whether or not to issue e - krona - it can have a major impact on the payment market, the banks ’ business models, the way interest rate setting functions, financial stability, and so on. the riksbank will investigate e - krona now i have given my view on the situation for sweden as one of the countries where the use of cash is declining the most and the fastest and where the general public are finding it increasingly difficult to get access to central bank money. the riksbank is one of the central banks that will need to take an active stance on whether or not to issue a digital currency first. we cannot wait any longer, and i shall now tell you what we intend to do in the coming years. we will need to work within three different areas at once. firstly, we need to identify what technologies can be used. this includes investigating both decentralised and centralised alternatives. it is important not to exclude alternatives in advance and thus limit the room for manoeuvre. perhaps what we need is a combination of centralisation and decentralisation? we also need to study what technical competence we have, and what we need. we need