ECB selects 36 firms for digital euro pilot

The European Central Bank has officially named the 36 payment providers selected to test the digital euro in a landmark 12-month pilot beginning in the second half of 2027. The roster includes heavyweights like Deutsche Bank, UniCredit, Revolut, Stripe, and Adyen, alongside smaller players such as Satispay and the Cooperative Bank of Chania, a Greek lender now set to operate in the same trial as two of the eurozone’s largest institutions.

The ECB published the list on Tuesday, drawn from over 50 applicants across 16 of the euro area’s 21 member states. Italy leads with seven participants, followed by Germany with five. The central bank emphasized that the selection represents “a broad range of business models and sizes,” deliberately mixing incumbent banks with app-based challengers and acquirers that have driven most of the growth in European payments over the past decade.

The pilot will use a beta version of the digital euro, functionally and technically close to what draft legislation envisions. However, it will not carry legal tender status, meaning no one is obliged to accept it, and no consumer outside the test will interact with it. The trial splits the 36 firms into two roles: distributing providers will issue beta digital euro accounts to Eurosystem staff and enable payments, while acquiring providers will sign up merchants to receive those payments. Several firms will perform both functions, and the ECB noted that a provider may end up offering services in a country different from 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 absent. Central bank staff will act as users, and merchants will include e-commerce sellers and businesses located on institutional premises, such as cafeterias and restaurants. Four use cases are prioritized: 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 subsidized. Providers will bear their own costs, receive no ECB funding, and are barred from charging pilot users any fees. This structure, as trade press had flagged, likely favors larger players that can absorb build and certification costs without a revenue line to point at. The ECB’s own pilot FAQ had estimated 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 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 remains unchanged: 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 $1.8 billion 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. 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.