A digital euro could be smoothly integrated into the existing European payments landscape while leaving ample scope for innovative features and technologies, testing from the ECB and Italian outfit Nexi has shown.
While a final decision on issuing a digital euro has yet to be made, the ECB has been busy investigating options ahead of a potential launch, which would come in 2026 at the earliest.
Last year, the central bank began working with five companies - Nexi, CaixaBank, Amazon, Worldline and EPI - to provide front-end prototypes to test different payment use cases.
Nexi was chosen for the point-of-sale payments initiated by the payee use case. Updating on the effort, it says that it integration with the existing payment landscape is possible and that a digital euro would work both online and offline, using independent designs, thus increasing the resilience.
Roberto Catanzaro, chief business officer, merchant solutions, Nexi, says: "An engaging user and merchant experience is paramount to ensure wide adoption of the digital euro and we have brought our best expertise in both acceptance and mobile payments technologies to set a clear way forward."
“What is the outlook for CBDCs in Europe?” will be the subject of a panel at EBAday 2023 in Madrid this July.