Prior to joining Loughborough in 2011, Alistair worked at Bayes Business School, the Bank of England; University of Surrey, London Business School, HM Treasury and for the Government of Malawi. He has a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. His research spans financial technology, money and central banking, bank capital and risk management, disaster risk finance, macroeconomics, financial regulation and applications of dynamic stochastic optimisation.

Loughborough University is one of the top-performing universities in the United Kingdom.

Less haste, more speed: why plans for retail CBDC need to be less ambitious

There are substantial project risks in the launch of retail CBDCs. These include: technical risks; difficulty of providing CBDC interfaces on a sustainable economic basis; and failure to achieve widespread adoption. Prototype retail CBDC designs, e.g. the Digital Pound and Digital Euro,  impose restrictions to reduce financial stability risks that serve to magnify these project risks. The solution is to be less ambitious. Target first launch on specific use cases in niche payment contexts where there is clear demand and initial financial subsidy can be justified to both cover initial technical risks and support the business models of service providers.