Webinar on Digital Euro - Webinar

The digital euro has moved from design to negotiation. Following the adoption of the Council’s position in December 2025 and the European Parliament’s negotiating mandate in July 2026, the proposed framework is now in trilogue, where the institutions must turn different positions on some of its most consequential features into a final legislative agreement.

What emerges from those negotiations will determine much more than the legal basis for a new form of central bank money. Questions around holding limits, privacy, acceptance, the cost and compensation model for payment service providers, the role of banks and other intermediaries, and the relationship between the digital euro and existing European payment solutions all have practical implications for how the system would work and whether consumers, merchants and the financial sector would use it.

The negotiations are unfolding while the Eurosystem is already moving ahead with technical preparations. The ECB is working towards a possible pilot in the second half of 2027 and potential readiness for issuance during 2029, on the assumption that the legislation is adopted in 2026. But issuance is not automatic: the ECB Governing Council will only decide whether to proceed once the legislative framework is in place.

For Central and Eastern Europe, the debate also raises questions about how a common digital euro framework will interact with very different national payment markets, levels of digitalisation and existing payment solutions across the region. For euro-area CEE economies in particular, the choices now being negotiated will eventually translate into concrete responsibilities for banks and payment providers and a new payment option for consumers and merchants.

Taking place while the trilogue negotiations are under way, this CEE Perspective Academy webinar will bring together public-sector decision-makers and representatives from the payments industry and wider stakeholder community to examine what is still on the negotiating table and what the eventual compromises could mean in practice. The discussion will look beyond whether Europe should have a digital euro to the question now becoming more immediate: what kind of digital euro will ultimately emerge from the negotiations?