Background & Biography
His current academic appointment concerns the infrastructure supporting money and financial markets. It follows three decades at European monetary institutions, including senior responsibilities for risk, monetary operations and payment systems. The academic role brings that practical background into research and education.
A January 2020 paper shows how he approaches a design problem through incentives. It proposed paying different interest rates on smaller and larger balances of central bank digital currency, or CBDC. The first portion would remain suitable for everyday spending; the return on amounts above it would discourage using the instrument for substantial savings. In his analysis, the second rate could become less attractive during stress, addressing sudden transfers away from bank deposits while preserving ordinary payment use. The distinction matters because controlling total holdings need not require treating every user balance identically. He also acknowledged the proposal’s limits: managing demand would not establish that issuance made sense everywhere, and households’ preferences and existing payment alternatives would still matter. This was a research proposal with illustrative parameters, rather than a description of an adopted product.
Notable Contributions
In a December 2021 collaboration, he distinguished reaching many users from capturing most transactions. The authors connected uptake to retailers accepting payments, distributors having workable incentives and customers finding the service useful.
His August 2022 paper with George Pantelopoulos compared six routes for improving international transfers. The analysis examined what actually settles a payment, alongside its speed, expense and reach. It assessed established banking arrangements, specialist technology providers and digital monetary instruments through the same accounting lens. The authors favoured connecting domestic instant payment networks and making prospective CBDC systems interoperable, with competitive currency conversion between them. They associated those arrangements with competition and preserving local monetary control. Their assessment also exposed conditions that a convenient customer interface cannot solve alone: compatible account addressing, legal certainty and efficient compliance checks. They acknowledged that smaller payment corridors might not justify the fixed investment, leaving room for improved existing arrangements. The contribution is a comparison of architectures and their constraints, rather than evidence that any one design has already prevailed.
In January 2024, a paper coauthored with Richard Senner approached deposit instability by asking where the money goes next. Buying a stablecoin does not, by itself, reveal whether funding leaves the banking system. If the issuer keeps the proceeds with a commercial bank, the transaction can redistribute deposits between banks. If it can instead hold the proceeds at the monetary authority, the destination changes the aggregate effect. The authors therefore distinguished competition for deposits among banks from arrangements that give other financial businesses access to public money. Their framework also recognises that returning funds to banks through wholesale instruments can change the composition of funding. For stablecoin analysis, the useful question becomes the issuer’s asset placement and access arrangements, rather than the label attached to the customer’s new claim.
A November 2024 study with Marco Marrazzo and Stephan Sauer turned the perspective towards the issuer of public digital money. Its scenarios distinguished people exchanging banknotes for CBDC from obtaining it through other changes in monetary liabilities. A simple substitution for cash would not automatically enlarge the issuer’s balance sheet. Other flows could affect the assets it held and the income those assets generated. The authors modelled additional earnings under positive interest rates, while stressing that restrained demand could make the gain modest. They also linked the risk outcome to the size and composition of the corresponding assets. This adds an issuer perspective to his research: the financial consequences depend on how people acquire the instrument and how its backing evolves, rather than following from digital issuance alone.
Why Katharos.ai Follows Ulrich Bindseil
His August 2024 collaboration with Richard Senner supplies a way to scrutinise research claims before applying them to policy. It compared economic models with the designs monetary authorities were describing at the time. The authors found that assumptions about interest payments, permitted balances, eligible users and automatic transfers from bank accounts could differ substantially. A model’s conclusions would therefore need to be read against the particular instrument it represented. They also questioned a static baseline: when cash use is already changing, introducing a digital alternative is a response to that change. Their critique did not make every earlier model useless. They explicitly left room for future designs that matched those assumptions. The editorial interest lies in that discipline of connecting a prediction to its premises.
A February 2025 paper with Charles-Enguerrand Coste and George Pantelopoulos applies similar scrutiny to vocabulary. The authors separated an instrument’s economic character from the database recording ownership. In their account, representing a bond on a distributed ledger does not make its underlying claim cease to be a bond. They examined definitions and the histories of terms, asking whether new expressions clarified a function or obscured an existing one. The paper also separated the question of who may use public money from the technology through which it is recorded. For readers evaluating digital finance, this offers a concrete analytical habit: identify the claim, the access conditions and the mechanism before accepting a broad technological label. Those are the authors’ conceptual arguments, rather than a statement of binding legal definitions.
Areas to Follow
- Links between national payment networks.
- Models reflecting proposed currency features.
- Clear distinctions between financial claims and recording technologies.
- Connections between instant transfers, securities settlement and public money used on distributed infrastructure.
Reporting Scope
Reviewed on 11 October 2026, this profile treats the dated studies as attributed analysis. Research conclusions and historical project plans are distinguished from current implementation or law.
Areas of Influence
His July 2025 account of TARGET Services places digital money within a wider operational setting. He described how large payments, securities transactions, instant transfers and collateral management connect through shared European infrastructure. The article discussed broader access for payment providers outside banking, links between currencies and work on settling distributed ledger transactions in public money. These were institutional services and programmes involving many participants, not systems that he claimed to have built alone. That account gives a specific reason to follow his work: the analytical choices concern infrastructure through which claims are transferred and settled. The article’s forward plans belong to its publication date; they do not establish which services have subsequently launched or what a future retail currency will contain.
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