What can central bank digital currency designers learn from asking potential users?

The ongoing initiatives to offer central bank money to consumers in the form of retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) have triggered discussions on its optimal design. So far, the perspective of potential users has not been considered widely. To strengthen this, we survey 2006 Austrian residents using a tailored questionnaire on attitudes towards a digital euro, selected technical features as well as potential security and privacy concerns. Only about half of the surveyed respondents express at least some interest in a digital euro. This subsample tends to attribute more importance to security aspects than to transaction data privacy. Similarly, offline functionality is preferred over a feature to make direct payments between persons. Our findings suggest central banks to embrace a more user-centric design of CBDC. This effort should include communicating the key concepts and benefits to the potential users.