Q22: How do other pan-European payment initiatives relate to the digital euro?

The European Central Bank answers:

The ECB welcomes European market initiatives that reach beyond domestic markets.

The digital euro should enable domestic and regional schemes to scale up across different use cases and across borders, facilitating easier, broader and more efficient acceptance of European private sector solutions thanks to the use of harmonised standards. European payment service providers stand to benefit from these opportunities, primarily through increased geographical reach and use cases not previously served.

The design envisages the possibility of integrating private solutions through, for instance, possible co-badging on physical cards and existing digital wallets. In both cases the digital euro would be the “fall-back” that enables full pan-European reach while preserving market access for domestic or regional schemes where they are accepted.

We answer them:

This question has been added in the most recent revision in October 2025 [1], likely as a response to the position paper by the European Parliament’s rapporteur Fernando Navarette [2], which rightfully points to existing initiatives in the private sector (cf. Q15). While it may sound reassuring that “the ECB welcomes [such] initiatives”, it stays unclear why we would need harmonised standards that go beyond what is already available with Instant SEPA transfers, and why we could not achieve such standardization without introducing a CBDC.

  1. European Central Bank, FAQs on a digital euro. https://web.archive.org/web/20250721000819/https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/faqs/html/ecb.faq_digital_euro.en.html, 2025.
  2. F. Navarette, Do we really need the digital euro: A solution to what problem exactly?, European Parliament, 2025.