The Right of Big Tech Companies to Issue Money in the Opinion of Consumers from France and Germany

With a vast customer base and the acquisition of information about their customers and their preferences in connection with their services, Big Tech companies are also becoming essential players in the financial sphere. Payment solutions offered by Big Tech companies, such as Google Pay or Alipay, familiarise consumers with the presence of such companies in the monetary sphere. The issuance of private money has the most excellent chance in a form regulated by public authorities and with a value stabilized to the national currency, regardless of whether it would be similar to narrow banking, synthetic CBDC or another, related form. This would provide the best ratio of benefits to economic and social costs generated by the emergence of such private money. The article aims to define the relationship between the characteristics of prospective Big Tech money individual users from France and Germany and their support for Big Tech’s right to issue their digital money. The study used data from an empirical survey designed by the author. The study used the logit model to assess the impact of selected determinants on the respondents’ willingness to accept Big Tech’s right to issue money. For this research, a stepwise regression was used to estimate the parameters of the logit model. The results revealed much greater flexibility in the approach to money on the part of French consumers than German consumers due to a significantly larger number of statistically significant explanatory variables and their differentiation in the studied groups of these variables. Differences in monetary preferences of societies of countries using a single currency should be taken into account both by companies seeking to launch the issuance of private stablecoins in the eurozone as well as by the European Central Bank intending to introduce the digital euro and by other regulators of the eurozone financial market.