20 April 2026

Payments are quietly becoming a question of sovereignty. As digital transactions displace cash and non-European providers dominate the infrastructure behind everyday purchases, EIF gathered policymakers and industry representatives to examine what the digital euro can realistically deliver, and how it fits alongside the private-sector solutions already taking shape. The debate covered strategic autonomy, interoperability standards, business model sustainability and the conditions for genuine adoption.

Digital Euro and payments interoperability

Opening Remarks

Marina Kaljurand MEP opened by setting out the scale of Europe's current dependence on non-European payment infrastructure. Two thirds of card payments in the euro area run through Visa and Mastercard, the majority of digital payments in shops and e-commerce rely on Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal, and thirteen euro area countries depend entirely on non-European providers for card transactions. Against that backdrop, she presented the digital euro as a central bank-backed means of payment designed for the digital age, complementing rather than replacing cash, and available free of charge with stronger privacy protections than existing electronic solutions. She highlighted the resilience dimension as particularly significant, noting that the Council's negotiating position, shaped in part by Baltic state and Finnish proposals, introduced offline payment capabilities and a dedicated chapter on emergency continuity. From an Estonian perspective, MEP Kaljurand stressed that the ability to sustain payments during electricity outages or cyber attacks represents the most concrete added value the digital euro can offer.

The Commission's Perspective

Ulrich Clemens, Team Leader for the Digital Euro at DG ECFIN, focused his remarks on two developments that have shifted the context since the Commission's original proposal. The first is the geopolitical situation, which has made clear that Europe's dependence on a small number of international card schemes is not a hypothetical risk: the possibility of payment infrastructure being suspended by a decision taken outside Europe has already materialised in other contexts. The digital euro would provide an EU-governed payments infrastructure that is technologically independent from foreign standards. The second development is the accelerating progress of European private-sector instant payment initiatives, which the Commission welcomes as fully aligned with its retail payments strategy. He was clear, however, that private solutions alone face a structural challenge in building the network effects needed for universal acceptance, whereas the digital euro's legal tender status delivers those effects by design from day one. On the legislative timeline, he confirmed that trilogue negotiations in the second half of the year are a realistic prospect, and identified compensation, distribution and interoperability as the key issues to be resolved, while stressing that the core features of the proposal, including offline functionality, strong privacy standards and legal tender status, must be preserved.

Industry views

Martina Weimert, CEO of the European Payments Initiative, spoke from the position of a private-sector provider already in the market. EPI's Wero wallet has reached 53 million customers across five countries within eighteen months, with e-commerce and point-of-sale rollout underway, and a newly operational interoperability network connecting thirteen countries and 130 million customers through partnerships with Bizum, MB Way, Bancomat and other national schemes. Her central argument was that this progress has been built on the European instant payment standard, and that shifting to a different technical framework for the digital euro would impose substantial new costs on providers that have already made significant investments, without a viable path to recover them given that private solutions, like the digital euro, are free to consumers. She called for a genuine public-private partnership in which the ECB adopts existing European standards rather than creating parallel ones, welcomed the offline functionality as a genuinely distinctive feature that does not compete with private offerings, and warned against a model that suppresses pricing to the point where European providers cannot fund future innovation, drawing a direct contrast with the commercial margins that allow US competitors to invest and scale.


Frida Stokland, EU Public Policy Lead for Payments at Amazon, brought the perspective of a merchant processing millions of transactions daily across nine European online stores. The core problem she identified is not the absence of payment options but their fragmentation: different refund timelines, dispute processes, settlement speeds and technical specifications across national schemes make it extremely difficult to offer customers a consistent experience, and too many authenticated transactions still fail for purely technical reasons. She argued that what Europe needs is not 27 sets of scheme rules but consistent, open standards covering the same use cases as cards, including recurring payments, reliable cross-border acceptance and settlement guarantees. On the digital euro specifically, Ms Stokland welcomed its strategic value in modernising the European payments landscape but stressed that adoption will not follow from design alone: it requires low transaction costs, room for value-added services to be built on top, and the ability for merchants to manage holdings in a way that mirrors how they operate with traditional currency. Her broader message was that no single solution should be treated as mutually exclusive, and that the best payment infrastructure in the world only succeeds if customers choose to use it.

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