Money as a Product: How CBDCs Are Being Built
The future of money may not be decided by policy alone, but by product design choices
When we hear “Central Bank Digital Currency” (CBDC), the conversation often jumps to big outcomes: financial inclusion, de-dollarization, faster cross-border payments. But as a product person, I find it useful to pause and ask a simpler question: how is this thing actually being built?
Because beneath the hype, CBDCs are products. They are designed, tested, and iterated on—just like the apps and platforms we use daily. And understanding their architecture reveals both the opportunities and the trade-offs central banks face.
1. Two-Tier Model: The Distribution Choice
Most retail CBDCs are being explored as a two-tier system.
The central bank runs the core ledger and issues the digital money.
Private players—banks, fintechs, wallet providers—deliver the user-facing experiences.
This mirrors how app stores or payment rails work. The platform (central bank) provides trust and settlement finality, while the ecosystem (private sector) provides usability and innovation.
Why does this matter? Because if CBDCs went direct-to-consumer, they could hollow out commercial banks. The two-tier model avoids that risk and leverages existing distribution.
2. APIs as the Interface Layer
Project Rosalind (led by the BIS) showed how APIs can be the connective tissue in a CBDC ecosystem. Think of APIs as the rails that let wallets, merchants, and banks plug into the central bank’s ledger.
From a product lens, this is the equivalent of deciding whether to build a closed platform (like early Apple) or an open one (like Android). CBDC APIs need to balance standardization (so systems can interoperate globally) with flexibility (so providers can innovate on top).
This is not trivial. A too-rigid design kills innovation; too-open creates fragmentation.
3. Access Enablers: A New Category of Intermediary
Project Sela introduced the idea of Access Enablers—entities that provide onboarding, KYC, and customer interfaces without actually holding customer funds.
This is a fascinating design choice. By unbundling “customer service” from “liquidity management,” CBDCs could open the door for a much wider set of players—fintechs, telecoms, even big tech—to participate in distribution.
In product terms, it’s like lowering the barriers for third-party developers to build on your platform. More participants usually mean more use cases, faster. But it also raises governance and cybersecurity questions.
4. The “Clean Slate” Opportunity in Cross-Border
The most ambitious promise of CBDCs is in cross-border payments. Today, they are slow, costly, and opaque because they run on a patchwork of correspondent banking networks.
CBDCs offer a “clean slate”: if countries coordinate designs upfront—common standards, interoperability, messaging protocols—they could bypass decades of legacy inefficiency.
But here’s the catch: if each central bank builds in isolation, we risk recreating the same fragmented mess we already have. From a product lens, it’s like building dozens of chat apps that can’t talk to each other.
5. Lessons for Builders
Stepping back, what does this teach us as product people?
Distribution matters as much as the core product. A CBDC ledger without private sector participation is like a platform without developers—technically sound, but practically irrelevant.
Interfaces define adoption. APIs and wallets will make or break CBDCs, not the cryptography behind them.
Design choices have second-order effects. Decide to let intermediaries in, and you get innovation plus complexity. Decide to exclude them, and you risk stagnation.
Interoperability must be intentional. Without early alignment, you get silos. With alignment, you get networks.
Final Thought
CBDCs are not just a monetary experiment. They are a live case study in how to design public infrastructure as a product—balancing trust, innovation, and usability.
And that’s why, even if you don’t care about monetary policy, it’s worth studying them. They show us how product thinking is becoming essential even in domains once thought to be purely regulatory or political.
Because at the end of the day, money too is a product. The question is: who designs it best?