ECB’s Cipollone: Digital Euro to Strengthen Europe’s Resilience in Payments

10 May 2024

By Isabel Teles – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Executive Board member Piero Cipollone on Friday said that the digital euro would contribute to bolstering the European payment environment.

Speaking at a meeting of the Centre for Latin American Monetary Studies in Madrid, Cipollone said, according to slides posted on the website of the ECB, that a European digital payment solution would ‘[s]trengthen Europe’s resilience [by] preserving Europe’s strategic autonomy while reducing our dependence on non-European payment providers.’

In the euro area, 13 out of 20 countries relied on international schemes for digital payments because they did not have a national card scheme, he said.

‘These [international] schemes account for 64% of all electronically-initiated transactions with cards issued in the euro area’, he added.

The lack of a European single payment solution for digital payments contributed to fragmentation, he said.

The digital euro would respond to evolving payment trends there were increasingly digital and make people’s lives easier by ‘[p]roviding a public digital means of payment that people could use free of charge for any digital payment in the euro area’, he said.