ECB names 36 payment firms for the digital euro pilot

Deutsche Bank, UniCredit, Revolut, Stripe and Adyen made the list. The 12-month trial starts in the second half of 2027, and the money it moves will not be legal tender.

The European Central Bank published the list on Tuesday: 36 payment service providers, drawn from more than 50 applicants, will run the first pilot of the digital euro.

The selected participants stretch from Deutsche Bank, UniCredit and Poste Italiane to Revolut, Stripe, Adyen, SumUp, Satispay, Worldline and the Cooperative Bank of Chania, a Greek co-operative lender that will now sit in a Eurosystem trial alongside two of the largest banks in the currency bloc.

The 36 come from 16 of the euro area’s 21 member states, with Italy supplying seven and Germany five. The ECB says they span “a broad range of business models and sizes”, which is the institutional way of saying that the pilot deliberately mixes incumbent banks with the acquirers and app-based challengers that have taken most of the growth in European payments over the past decade.

The pilot is due to begin in the second half of 2027 and to run for 12 months. It will use a beta version of the digital euro, functionally and technically close to what the draft legislation envisages but carrying no legal tender status, which means nobody is obliged to accept it and no consumer outside the test will touch it.

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The mechanics split the 36 into two roles. Distributing providers will give Eurosystem staff beta digital euro accounts and the ability to pay from them, while acquiring providers will sign up merchants to receive those payments.

Several firms will do both, and the ECB notes that a provider may end up offering services in a country other than the one it applied from.

Testing will take place at the ECB and 19 national central banks, from Estonia to Portugal, with Bulgaria and Malta the two euro-area absentees. Central bank staff will act as the users, and the merchants will be e-commerce sellers plus the sort of businesses that operate on institutional premises, cafeterias and restaurants among them.

Four use cases are prioritised: online person-to-person payments, offline person-to-person payments over NFC, tap-to-pay at the point of sale, and online and mobile commerce.

Participation is not a subsidised exercise. Providers will bear their own costs, receive no ECB funding, and are barred from charging pilot users any fees, a structure that trade press had already flagged as one likely to favour the larger players, since only they can absorb the build and certification work without a revenue line to point at. The ECB’s own pilot FAQ had estimated that about 10 to 30 providers would be selected. It ended up with 36.

“The strong market interest in the pilot shows the private sector’s readiness to engage actively and quickly advance with the digital euro project to strengthen the European payments landscape,” said Piero Cipollone, the ECB executive board member who chairs the high-level task force on the project.

The day before the announcement, in an interview with Jornal de Negócios, he had made the same point more bluntly, noting that it is more instructive to watch what people do than what they say, and that over 50 institutions had applied.

The strategic case behind the project has not changed: the ECB wants to reduce the bloc’s dependence on US-based card networks and payment platforms, a dependence that the recent wave of consolidation, including Mastercard’s $1.8bn stablecoin purchase, has done nothing to loosen.

The same sovereignty logic runs through the EU’s universal digital wallet plans, and the ECB has spent much of the past two years fending off objections to the currency’s design, most persistently on privacy and data.

The timetable now rests on Brussels rather than Frankfurt. The ECB aims to be ready for a possible first issuance in 2029, but only if the digital euro Regulation is adopted this year, and it has said it will not decide whether to issue the currency until the law exists. The list of countries where each provider will actually offer pilot services is due later in the year.