Banque de France has announced its chosen candidates for the integration of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) for interbank settlements.

The Paris-based central bank issued a call for applications for experiments in interbank settlements and has chosen eight organisations to begin developing the technology and infrastructure to support the project.

The group includes: Accenture, Euroclear, HSBC, Iznes, LiquidShare, ProsperUS, SEBA Bank and Société Générale.

The experiments proposed by the successful candidates will allow the central bank to explore new methods of exchanging financial instruments - excluding cryptoassets - against central bank money and to test the regulation in central bank digital money in order to improve the conditions of execution of cross-border payments.

It will also allow the Banque de France to revisit the methods of making central bank money available.

The central bank will begin work in the coming days with each of the eight candidates in order to carry out the experiments over the next few months.

“The strong mobilisation around this call for applications testifies to the interest of the actors of finance and technology for this approach aimed at exploring the potential contributions of a digital currency issued by the central bank to improve the functioning of the financial markets, in particular interbank settlements," read a statement.

It added that the lessons learned from these experiments would constitute a direct contribution to the more global reflection conducted by the Eurosystem on the benefits of a CBDC.

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