Australians would rather have accounts with commercial banks and keep their data away from the RBA.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has examined the value the public would place on a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). It looked at willingness to pay for the use of CBDC in a digital wallet and the privacy benefits that CBDC might offer.
The RBA described its hypothetical CBDC as “a digital currency that is even safer and potentially more private than commercial bank deposits” and used a discrete choice experiment to assess public valuations of goods without markets.
The research considered fees for privacy and safety options of up to 5 Australian dollars (AUD), which is equivalent to about $3 U.S. dollars. It added that that users paying 5 AUD per year would generate about 100 million AUD in fees — not a significant enough amount to “overwhelm the range of other considerations relevant to the CBDC issuance decision.”
