- European Card Payment Cooperation (ECPC), nexo standards and Berlin Group to work with ECB to implement digital euro
- Standards to allow European payment solutions to minimise costs, expand geographical reach and diversify use cases
- Adoption of the digital euro regulation by co-legislators to unlock potential and provide certainty for market actors' future investments in payments
The European Central Bank (ECB) has signed agreements with three European standard‑setting organisations - ECPC, nexo standards and the Berlin Group - to reuse these existing open technical standards, accessible to all stakeholders, for processing digital euro online payments.
The standards include:
- CPACE standards, developed by ECPC, support contactless "tap‑to‑pay" payments using near‑field communication between a payment device and a payment terminal;
- nexo standards specifications connect merchants' systems with the back-end systems of payment service providers and acquirers. They are used, for example, to support payment acceptance and cash-machine transactions;
- Berlin Group standards allow payments to be made using an alias (such as a mobile phone number) and support balance checks and reconciliation across mobile devices and payment acceptance in areas like digital euro transactions initiated in merchant apps on smartphones.
By leveraging these open standards and working closely with the respective standardisation bodies, the ECB minimises adoption costs for the market and encourages early coordination among all involved players, including payment service providers and standardisation entities.
Free access, cost minimisation and coordination are particularly important as Europe currently lacks a universally available open standard supported across payment terminals and depends heavily on proprietary standards owned by international card schemes and global digital wallets. Using widely adopted European standards will simplify digital euro acceptance and create a uniform user experience across the euro area, while enabling European payment schemes to expand geographically and diversify use cases. With this approach, for instance, a national card scheme could expand its operations to point-of-sale (POS) environments outside its home market without requiring technical POS terminal upgrades.
The benefits of the digital euro standard will materialise ahead of digital euro issuance. Once EU co-legislators adopt the digital euro Regulation, providing certainty that the standards will apply across the euro area given the digital euro's legal tender status, European payment solutions providers would be able to scale up beyond national borders. Adoption of the Regulation will provide market actors with certainty for their future investments and reduce Europe's current dependencies in the area of payments.
"This partnership shows our strong commitment to making sure the digital euro works with existing European standards that the private sector can also use," said ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone, who chairs the High-Level Task Force on a digital euro. "The open digital euro standards will provide a European free alternative to current proprietary standards, make it easier for new European providers to enter the market and give European payment service providers and merchants the certainty they need to invest, innovate and compete across the euro area."
Ana Grade, CEO of ECPC, stated: "ECPC is very pleased with this bilateral agreement with the ECB on the use of the CPACE standard for the digital euro project, which will further enhance the standard's visibility and market presence."
Jean-Philippe Joliveau, Chairman of the Board of nexo standards, added: "We are very proud to collaborate with the ECB on the digital euro project. This cooperation confirms the position of nexo standards as an international and collaborative standardisation body for payment acceptance, supporting interoperability across the payments ecosystem."
Markus Schierack, Managing Director of SRC, commented: "We welcome the ECB's decision to engage with the Berlin Group. Open standards are the foundation of a competitive and interoperable European payments market. The ECB's participation in our standards process is a positive step for the broader ecosystem."
The standards were selected together with market participants represented in the Rulebook Development Group and fulfil the goals of the Eurosystem payments strategy. Additional standards could follow in the future, subject to approval by the ECB's Governing Council.
Please find here selected pictures from the agreements signing ceremony.
