Q5: What value would the digital euro offer merchants?

The European Central Bank answers:

The digital euro would be a pan-European solution allowing merchants to market their products and services to customers all over Europe with a seamless and consistent payment experience. It would decrease dependence on non-European payment solutions by offering a European alternative, putting merchants in a stronger position to negotiate conditions with payment solution providers, thereby reducing their own costs.

In developing the digital euro, the ECB is working closely with merchants and their representatives. The design of the digital euro takes into account what merchants find important, such as seamless integration with existing checkout systems, ease of use and payment resilience. The digital euro would also allow merchants to receive payments instantly without additional costs, even without an internet connection.

We answer them:

Merchants will have to bear the likely substantial cost of integrating support for the digital euro with their business systems. The legal requirement to accept the digital euro at virtually all points of sale across Europe will create very high demand for qualified IT integrators, which can in turn charge a high premium over typical integration costs. This will put business owners at a disadvantage when negotiating conditions as they will be required to roll out support in a market with already short supply. While the digital euro is planned to be offered free of charge for consumers, the current design explicitly includes fees to be paid by merchants to payment service providers for access to the digital euro infrastructure (KF4).

The proprietary nature of the digital euro technology contributes to a challenging integration, as integrators will have to work against a “black box” with limited technical details available to them. Integration is also rarely a one-time expense, as the integration needs to be continuously tested and maintained as IT systems evolve (KF4).

The request for substantial changes to the current digital euro design by merchant associations, such as enabling B2B payments and combining the online with the offline version [1], clearly shows their disagreement with the current design. The promised ability to receive digital euros instantly is contradicted by the promise made to customers to shop safer online with conditional payments such as pay-on-delivery (cf. Q21). Receiving digital euro without Internet connection is incompatible with the current plan of a zero-euro holding limit for merchants.

  1. Merchant Payment Coalition Europe, Digital euro: Make it work for merchants, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.eurocommerce.eu/app/uploads/2025/09/20250924-joint-stat-pay-digitaleuro-merchantpaymentscoalitioneurope.pdf [Accessed: Jan. 9, 2026].