ECB targets summer for digital euro standards: Cipollone

European Central Bank Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said on Tuesday that the ECB expects by this summer to announce the European standards it will use for a potential digital euro, a step aimed at helping payment providers and merchants prepare their systems ahead of any issuance decision.

Cipollone told European Union lawmakers that, once those standards are announced, the ECB will work with market participants so they can begin embedding them into payment terminals and other solutions as soon as possible.

Cipollone said finalizing the rulebook would let new terminals and payment apps ship with the necessary rails already embedded, giving European companies a head start once EU legislation is in place, which the ECB expects to happen in 2026.

The ECB’s digital euro pilot, for which it opened a call for licensed payment service providers earlier in March, will run for 12 months from the second half of 2027, Cipollone said, testing person-to-person and point-of-sale payments in a controlled environment as part of plans to be technically ready for a possible issuance around 2029 if lawmakers sign off on the legal framework.

The digital euro: preparing for launch. Source: ECB

ECB says costs should be weighed

Earlier ECB analysis estimated that a digital euro could cost EU banks 4-6 billion euros over four years, an amount the central bank described as roughly 3% of their annual information technology maintenance budget. Cipollone told lawmakers those costs should be weighed against the long-term benefits of keeping more merchant fees and scaling European payment schemes.

Cipollone reiterated that the digital euro is conceived as a public payments infrastructure that private intermediaries such as banks and payment service providers would use to offer wallets and services, rather than a direct-to-consumer product from the ECB.

He said the goal is to provide pan-European rails that reduce dependence on international card schemes, with co-badged cards and bank wallets able to switch between domestic schemes and the digital euro across the euro area.

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​Cipollone said the digital euro is meant to complement cash and bank deposits rather than replace them and highlighted that accessibility features, such as voice commands and large-font displays, are being built into the reference app design from the outset to ensure inclusivity.

He also said that the ECB wants central bank money to remain the “anchor” for future wholesale markets, pointing to its Pontes project, which tests settling tokenized securities in central bank money across different distributed ledger technology platforms, and its Appia roadmap for a tokenized European financial ecosystem. 

In a separate speech on Monday, he outlined how tokenized central bank money could serve as the settlement asset for stablecoins and tokenized deposits.

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