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As momentum builds around the potential launch of a digital euro, the European Central Bank (ECB) is seeking expertise from across the eurozone to collaborate on shaping the future of digital currency.
This initiative, aimed at fostering collaboration with stakeholders across sectors, is part of the ECB’s broader digital euro exploration and preparation and could help shape how payment service providers (PSPs) can make the planned central bank digital currency (CBDC) commercially viable.
The ECB’s new innovation platform invites interest from a broad range of stakeholders, including market players such as merchants, banks and fintechs, as well as research institutions and technical experts.
Participants will engage in both practical and theoretical partnerships, allowing for hands-on experimentation, as well as conceptual exploration of the digital euro's potential impact on society.
Successful applicants — which the ECB is describing as “pioneers” — will be tasked with looking at how conditional payments, a system where payments occur under certain pre-set conditions, might operate within a simulated digital euro environment.
This partnership will allow participants to test interactions with digital euro interfaces, offering a firsthand look at the ECB’s technical infrastructure, expected to go live in February 2025.
In line with the ECB’s objectives, pioneers will contribute to understanding how the digital euro could work in practical retail settings.
Although pioneers will work independently of the ECB, they will have access to onboarding packages with technical guidance, user journey documentation and support on a best-efforts basis.
The ECB encourages interested applicants to submit outcome reports, which may be featured in the ECB’s own project findings, by May 2025.
The central bank has also said that it is forming “visionary” partnerships that are aimed at conceptual discussions around the societal impact of the digital euro.
This segment of its work will focus on issues such as tokenisation and community challenges, while selected visionaries will engage in theoretical work, presenting innovative use cases and ideas for how a digital euro might address societal needs.
Successful applicants will be invited to half-day workshops with the ECB digital euro project team, set to begin in early January 2025.
Interested stakeholders are encouraged to submit their applications, detailing their experience, partnership goals and a brief presentation of their solution or idea.
Joint applications, particularly those combining roles across the digital euro ecosystem, “are encouraged”, according to the ECB, which has set a deadline of November 30.
Why should the payments industry engage with this?
In many ways, this innovation platform from the ECB is the ultimate olive branch to the incredibly sceptical payments ecosystem, where stakeholders have begrudgingly accepted that a digital euro is coming down the line but have hardly warmed to the initiative.
Payments players see this as something that could easily go wrong, whether that is through a run on retail banks or a heavy investment that consumers simply do not use.
However, the ECB here appears to be reaching out for input into its plans, and this gives PSPs — whether payments and e-money firms or banks — the opportunity to feed into a project that could realistically be operationalised in the next five years if the EU passes legislation and the ECB takes the decision to issue a digital euro.
Participants can gain early access to the digital euro's technical infrastructure and contribute to shaping its design and functionality, and engaging with the platform could allow stakeholders to test their ideas in a controlled environment, providing an opportunity to validate concepts and refine their offerings based on practical feedback.
Early involvement can enable stakeholders to prepare for market readiness, allowing them to roll out solutions that align with the digital euro, rather than suffer the uncertainty that some regulatory requirements can bring until the regulation has actually become actionable.
Participants can also gain insights into regulatory requirements associated with the digital euro, ensuring that their products and services comply with emerging regulations, and ultimately, be part of the dialogue that could eventually lead to a competitive advantage.
The innovation platform is the latest opportunity for a direct feedback loop with the makers of the digital euro, and although it is unlikely to mean outcomes are perfect for everybody, it does show that the ECB is actively seeking input from those that its end-product will affect the most.
