Sight deposits

Cash management - liquidity.

Sight deposits include current accounts, overnight deposits and money at call.

Contrasted with term deposits, which are less liquid for the depositor.

Pilot project eliminates barriers in siloed financial market infrastructures

"Economically and legally, the wholesale CBDC used in Helvetia III is equivalent to sight deposits on the Swiss National Bank balance sheet...

A key difference to sight deposits is that the pilot makes tokenised central bank money available on the same third-party platform where the tokenised assets are held.

This eliminates barriers in today’s siloed financial market infrastructures where financial assets and central bank money are usually held on separate systems that are linked in order to synchronise payments and asset transfers.

With wholesale CBDC as piloted in Helvetia III, assets and central bank money are instead closely integrated.

This reduces the need for synchronisation and reconciliation and facilitates programmability."

Naresh Aggarwal, associate director, policy & technical, ACT - July 2024.

See also

• Balance sheet
• Call money
• Cash management
• Central bank money
• Deposit
• Infrastructure
• Liquidity
• Programmability
• Reconciliation
• Swiss National Bank (SNB)
• Term deposits
• Wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC)

Other resources

• Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and other digital currencies - Naresh Aggarwal, associate director, policy & technical, ACT - July 2024

• Embracing diversity, advancing together – results of the 2023 BIS survey on central bank digital currencies and crypto - Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Paper 147 - June 2024