Cipollone: digital euro pilot picks 36 firms, first payments within a year

Serguey Asael Shinder10 October 2026, 09:562 min read

The ECB published on 8 October an interview that Executive Board member Piero Cipollone gave to Corriere della Sera (conducted on 23 September). Cipollone leads the ECB's work on the digital euro, and the interview contains the clearest timetable the ECB has given recently.

The timetable, in his words:

• The pilot project was launched in the summer; first tests start next year, with "the first payments being made in less than 12 months".
• In May the ECB received nearly 60 applications to join next year's pilot, including several Italian banks; it selected 36. Technical-standards agreements were signed in April.
• The EU legislative text should be ready by the end of the year — Cipollone stresses that "not everything is up to the ECB".

What the digital euro would be. A complement to cash, not a replacement — "at no cost to individuals, just like cash today". It would sit in an app provided by the ECB, a bank or another payment provider; there will also be a card, and offline payments that pass "from one device to another, just like cash" when power or internet is down.

The merchant argument. Cipollone's economic case is fees. Merchants paying by card "often have no real alternative" and pay fees that are "opaque and often high"; he cites Italy's 570,000 merchants employing almost two million people. With a public alternative, he says, the cost of accepting digital payments could be halved for small merchants, and the digital euro could be built into European private payment solutions — he names Satispay and Bancomat as taking part.

The strategic argument. He ties the project to strategic autonomy: after energy dependence came the realisation of similar vulnerabilities elsewhere — "without our own digital payment system, we are at the mercy of other operators."

Why it matters for euro markets. The digital euro is a payments project, not a monetary-policy tool, but its design decisions — holding limits, remuneration, the role of banks — determine how much deposit outflow banks would face. With legislation targeted for year-end and payments within a year, those parameters are now the near-term questions to watch.

Source: ECB, "Interview with Corriere della Sera", Piero Cipollone, published 8 October 2026 — https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/inter/date/2026/html/ecb.in261008~3184e7d0d0.en.html