Executive Board member Piero Cipollone sets out a two track modernization of euro area money: a retail digital euro distributed through banks, and tokenized central bank money for wholesale settlement, as cash use falls and private digital assets rise.
The European Central Bank is not just upgrading the plumbing of European payments. It is rewriting what its own money is, moving the central bank's liability onto programmable infrastructure so that public money can sit natively next to private digital settlement assets like stablecoins, rather than ceding that ground by default.
That is the practical shape of the strategy Piero Cipollone, Member of the ECB's Executive Board, set out on 25 June 2026 at the International Banking Federation's Board Meeting. The speech, officially distributed by the ECB on its press channel, is the international-boardroom consolidation of a line Cipollone has been developing for the better part of a year, including his 29 September 2025 digital-euro remarks and his 24 November 2025 strategy speech.
Three converging pressures make the redesign urgent, in Cipollone's framing at the IBFed meeting. Cash use is falling across the euro area. Distributed ledger technology, the shared-database approach that underpins crypto and a growing slice of mainstream finance, has moved from experiment to production. And the policy goal of reducing dependencies on non-European payment rails has sharpened, putting resilience at the center of the strategic conversation rather than at its edge.
The Eurosystem's response is what Cipollone calls a "comprehensive payments strategy," with a goal of an integrated, future-oriented, competitive European payments market that still preserves monetary policy transmission, financial stability, and continuity of the system.
The plan splits into two tracks that share a single conceptual premise: central bank money should be usable wherever modern settlement happens. The first track is the retail digital euro, a digital form of central bank money for everyday payments, intended to complement cash rather than replace it. Distribution runs through EU-licensed payment service providers, the ECB's formal term for banks and other regulated payment firms, so the digital euro is meant to strengthen, not bypass, the existing retail banking layer.
The second track is tokenized central bank money for wholesale use: bank-to-bank and cross-border settlement, including securities and tokenized assets. This is the part where the economic nature of ECB money actually changes. Instead of being represented as balances on internal bank systems, central bank liability is issued or represented on programmable ledgers, the technology often called DLT, where settlement, collateral management, and compliance logic can be coded in. Wholesale pilots underway at the ECB are exploring how that tokenized central bank money can interoperate across borders and across different ledger platforms.
The strategic point of doing both at once is sovereignty and resilience. By issuing its own money on programmable rails, the Eurosystem keeps public money at the center of European settlement and offers a regulated alternative to private digital settlement assets such as stablecoins. By distributing the retail piece through banks, the ECB avoids disintermediating the financial sector and keeps the existing customer-relationship layer intact.
Cross-border business payments form a third axis, running across both retail and wholesale use cases, where the ECB explicitly wants European payment service providers to compete with international card networks and emerging non-European stablecoin rails.
The open questions are practical, not conceptual. The ECB has not yet committed to a launch timeline for the digital euro, and the speech does not present it as operational at scale. Tokenized central bank money remains a pilot-stage workstream. The shape of interoperability between public tokenized money and private ledgers, the regulatory perimeter for stablecoins competing in the same space, and the practical willingness of EU-licensed payment service providers to retool around programmable rails are the things to watch next.
What the speech does is lock in the strategic shape: a two-track modernization of public money, with banks retained as the distribution layer, programmable infrastructure accepted as the new settlement medium, and resilience elevated to a first-order design goal. For European payments, that is a more consequential shift than any single product launch would have been.