Galhau announced on Tuesday that the bank has kicked off the second phase of experimentation into a wholesale CBDC, which could be used to streamline domestic and cross-border transactions between banks. CBDCs are digital versions of a jurisdiction's sovereign currency which, in France's case, is the euro.

Central banks are increasingly exploring wholesale CBDCs that are built on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and promise to help speed up interbank settlements.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an association of central banks from around the world, has a number of ongoing experiments with central banks across Asia and Europe that are testing wholesale CBDCs for a variety of use cases, including cross-border payments.