FortuneSam Birchall
Visa and Mastercard handle nearly half of Europe’s card payments. The digital euro aims to change that
“Payment systems are not neutral; they are instruments of power,” Gilles Boyer, a French member of the European Parliament, said in June. “We Europeans have had many wake-up calls about our dependence on the U.S.
The new form ofdigital central bank currency, proposed by theEuropean Central Bank(ECB), will act as an electronic alternative to the physical money issued by the bank, offering people and businesses in the euro area a free and universally accepted option for making payments.
A 12-month pilot is scheduled to start in the second half of 2027, and 36 finance firms, includingDeutsche Bank, Revolut,Adyen, and UniCredit, are signed up to participate. Businesses will need to accept digital euros, in-store and online, by 2029.
Finance is one of several fronts where EU officials fear the bloc has…
Read the full story at Fortune