The central bank of Sweden Riksbank pilots phase two of its e-krona project with Swedish bank Handelsbanken and TietoEVRY, a Finnish IT software and service company providing IT and product engineering services.

The pilot project run by the Riksbank aims to assess the possibilities of introducing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

The e-krona pilot is therefore moving on from only having simulated participants to cooperation with external participants in the test environment.

In this second phase, one aspect the Riksbank hopes to investigate is how well the e-krona’s technical platform works when integrated with the internal systems of a commercial bank.

Involving external actors as participants in the test environment will make it possible for the Riksbank to evaluate the integration between the participants’ existing systems and the technical platform for the e-krona pilot.

The Riksbank will, for instance, be testing an integration of the payment flows developed during the first year of the pilot with the participants’ internal systems.

“The Riksbank and the Nordic payments market are leaders in their fields, and for Handelsbanken, this partnership gives us the opportunity to evaluate what benefits the currency may provide, as well as giving us the chance to create value for the Bank, our customers and society in general,”

said Benny Johansson, Head of Nordic Payments at Handelsbanken.

Featured image credit: Image by Christoph Meinersmann from Pixabay