The German CEO of a firm that prints currency notes believes that physical currency will not disappear anytime soon and that it will live side-by-side with digital cash.
Ralf Wintergerst, the CEO of Giesecke+Devrient (G+D), a 170-year-old firm printing currency notes, said that digital currency is a central bank-issued digital form of physical money and that it was different from cryptocurrency, which was not still officially regulated.
He was part of the first conference of the North Africa Middle East Initiative (NMI), which comprises German companies eager to exploit business opportunities in the region.
Wintergerst told a gathering at Expo 2020 in Dubai: “I believe that physical currency will exist for the foreseeable future. And I believe that because we have to imagine that when somebody pulls the digital plug and nothing works anymore, how do we pay? There must be a resilient form for payment in the future too and this is cash, but it will coexist with digital cash.”
He laid stress on how digital transformation was a dominant theme of the present time, with a lot of money going into technological development and digitization.
“Both in Germany and here also (the Middle East) there are a lot of opportunities of moving things like government services to people directly with digital solutions or finding digital payment solutions. There is a wide range of applications.”
