Euro area central banks have launched a recruitment drive for payment firms to take part in a digital euro pilot, with selected participants due to be notified in June.
The pilot is designed to test how a digital euro — a proposed electronic form of central bank money for everyday use — would work in real-life conditions, including person-to-person and person-to-business payments, Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, told the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament on Tuesday.
Activities will take place both online and offline at Eurosystem central bank premises, including payments at on-site cafeterias, restaurants and via e-commerce services, he added.
Licensed payment service providers (PSPs) were invited to submit expressions of interest earlier this month, with the application deadline set for May.
Development work is expected to start in the third quarter of 2026, ahead of a pilot launch in the second half of 2027 that would run for 12 months.
Accessibility and payment standards
Cipollone also said the ECB has signed a collaboration agreement with Spain’s ONCE Foundation for Cooperation and Social Inclusion of People with Disabilities to help design and test the digital euro mobile app once prototypes are available.
The ECB is exploring features such as voice commands, large-font displays and simplified workflows.
Work is also under way on how the digital euro would fit into Europe’s existing payment systems, including co-badging with domestic payment schemes — where a single physical card could be used both at home and across the euro area — and setting common European standards that private payment providers could use.
The ECB expects to announce the standards it will use for the digital euro by this summer.
Cipollone repeated that the ECB would only consider issuing a digital euro once relevant EU legislation is in place and said it is working on the assumption that the Regulation could be adopted this year.
Technical preparations are being made for the possibility of issuing a digital euro from 2029.
Separately, Cipollone said Pontes — the Eurosystem’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) solution for settling transactions in central bank money — is due to be launched in the third quarter of 2026, and it recently published a roadmap for Appia, an initiative to help build an integrated European market for digital assets.
