ECB signs with three major European payment standards organizations: Digital euro to adopt open European standards, lowering deployment barriers

The European Central Bank (ECB) announced in an official release on 4/24 that it has signed a cooperation agreement with three European payment standards organizations—European Card Payment Cooperation (ECPC), nexo standards, and Berlin Group—using these existing open European technology standards as the foundation for online payments with the digital euro (digital euro). This is a concrete step in the ECB’s work to implement the digital euro, aiming to lower the deployment threshold for payment market participants and to avoid reliance on proprietary international payment standards.

Functions matched to the three sets of standards

Standards organization Adopted standard Function mapped to ECPC CPACE Near Field Communication (NFC) sensing payments (tap-to-pay) between payment devices and terminals nexo standards nexo specifications Payment acceptance and ATM transaction agreements between merchant systems and payment service providers (PSP) / acquirers (acquirer) Berlin Group Berlin Group standards Initiating payments (using an alias such as a mobile phone number), balance inquiries, and reconciliation between mobile devices and the system

Strategic goals

In its announcement, the ECB listed five main strategic goals:

Reduce the cost for market participants to introduce new payment infrastructure

Promote early coordination among payment service providers (PSPs)

Establish a unified user experience across the euro area

Enable the geographic expansion of existing European payment solutions without requiring POS terminal hardware upgrades

Reduce Europe’s reliance on proprietary international payment standards

ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said, “This partnership demonstrates our clear commitment to ensure that the digital euro can interoperate with existing European standards.”

Timeline: build the standards first, then wait for legislation

The ECB emphasized that the results of this standards cooperation will allow market participants to benefit before the digital euro is officially launched. However, the final point for scaled, widespread deployment will still be determined only after the EU’s co-legislators pass the digital euro Regulation. In other words, this move is an early technical groundwork, running in parallel with the progress of legislative actions on the political level.

Relevant context

This release continues the ECB’s digital euro development pace from the past year. abmedia previously reported on the EU’s dual-track design for the digital euro—advancing the online and offline versions in parallel—and that the EU is considering issuing the digital euro on Ethereum or Solana to take on dollar stablecoins. With this cooperation at the standards level, the receiving-side infrastructure for the online version is clearly narrowed down to the existing European ecosystem.

For the European payments market, this means that Visa/Mastercard’s existing international standards will face future options on par in the euro area, but led by Europe. For global stablecoin and dollar stablecoin providers, the euro area’s payment infrastructure rapidly consolidating toward “European standards + ECB-led CBDC” will directly affect the relative convenience and compliance space for euro area users to access USDC and USDT.

What to watch next

The ECB will subsequently open more existing European standards for inclusion in the digital euro specifications (subject to approval by the ECB’s Governing Council)

The legislative progress of the digital euro Regulation in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union

Euro area merchants and PSPs’ responses to and timelines for practical deployments of the three sets of standards: CPACE, nexo, and Berlin Group

Whether the ECB will push another set of specifications for an “offline version of the digital euro” using a similar model

This article, ECB and three major European payment standards organizations sign a deal: digital euro adopts open European standards, lowering the deployment barrier, first appeared on Lian News ABMedia.