DCO Policy Watch – Seventh Edition
December 2025
The seventh edition of the DCO Policy Watch looks at how the “financial plumbing” of the digital economy is being rewired. Building on Edition 6 on architecting the interconnected digital economy (Digital trade, tax, and cross-border data flows), it shifts focus to how value moves.
Legacy correspondent banking, slow settlement, and siloed data no longer meet current needs. Real-time payment (RTP) systems, central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiments, and private payment rails built by FinTechs, stablecoins, and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) are emerging to fill the gap. The core message: if public payment rails stay slow, costly, or hard to access, users will shift to private, foreign alternatives – with consequences for monetary sovereignty, financial stability, and consumer protection.
This edition offers a leadership playbook structured around three pillars for digital finance:
- Pillar 1: Modernizing payment rails – the global shift to instant payments, new cross-border models, and lessons from leading RTP systems.
- Pillar 2: The Evolving Landscape of Digital Currencies – balancing public and private money, applying “same risk, same regulation” and managing digital dollarization risks.
- Pillar 3: Open Finance – moving beyond Open Banking to secure, consent-based data sharing that supports competition, innovation and financial inclusion.
The report concludes with a roadmap for DCO Member States – practical steps for countries to modernize payment systems, manage digital currencies, and embed Open Finance within wider data protection and digital identity frameworks.