Adoption of Central Bank Digital Currencies: A Data-Driven Exploration of Key Influential Factors

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a digital form of fiat currency issued and regulated by central banks. Understanding the drivers and barriers for CBDC adoption is crucial for helping the key stakeholders determine the important areas and concerns that need to be addressed to ensure a successful integration of CBDCs in the financial system. This paper employs a data-driven approach to understand major themes regarding CBDC adoption in news articles using topic modeling, followed by aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) to prioritize the factors influencing CBDC adoption. The findings highlight digital infrastructure, digital economy, and financial innovation as top adoption drivers, and security, user trust, and policy and regulations as the major barriers. The data-driven approach of using ABSA to rank a list of drivers and barriers is the first of its kind and can be generalized to rank factors in other domains.