European banks are pushing back against plans for a digital version of the euro, warning they are being asked to cover the costs of the European Central Bank’s flagship experiment.
Lenders say they are being asked to pay for an experiment that adds costs but solves no new problems.
“We are not opposed to the digital euro,” said Martina Weimert, CEO of the European Payments Initiativ (EPI), a network of banks that launched its own system before the ECB’s project existed.
“But someone must pay for it — and right now, that seems to be us,” she told Brussels Signal October 17.
Her group’s wallet, Wero, already lets users send money instantly between accounts in Germany, Belgium and France, with online and in-store payments to follow soon.
“Our shareholders saw an urgent need to create a European solution able to compete with the big international schemes,” Weimert said. “We built it before anyone was talking about a digital euro.”
Banks see that difference as crucial. The digital euro, they say, is a top-down project that would duplicate what the private sector had already paid to build.
Ralf Hammal, a manager involved in the development of the banks’ payment network, said: “The digital euro doesn’t fix a real problem that exists today — it just asks us to start again.”
The digital euro would be a new form of money issued directly by the ECB and held in digital wallets — like cash on a phone rather than in a bank account.
Hamal noted that Europe’s instant-payment system already settles transfers within seconds. “If you pay with an existing wallet, the transfer happens through the rules every bank in the SEPA [Single Euro Payments Area] already uses,” he told Brussels Signal “The digital euro would rebuild everything on top. That’s another huge investment for something people can already do.”
Julie Dardelet-Guérin, communications manager for the banks’ project, said the network now counts more than 44 million users and over a 100 million transactions worth €7.5 billion.
“Solutions already exist; it’s time to capitalise on them instead of rebuilding from scratch,” she said.
Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, told members of the European Parliament on October 17 that the digital euro is meant to complement, not replace, existing systems and that the ECB will reuse infrastructure “wherever possible”.
But she did not say who would pay for connecting thousands of banks to the new platform.
“It’s a heavy investment for every single bank,” Weimert said. He said each lender would have to install a second accounting system and a “waterfall mechanism” to move funds between central-bank and private accounts. “It’s not an insertion, it’s a duplication.”
Banks warn that those costs could slow innovation. “In 10 years, maybe the digital euro will find a use,” Hammal said. “But, meanwhile, it risks holding back the progress already made.”
That argument comes with its own limits. For now, only a handful of countries are using the banks’ new network, raising questions about whether it truly serves the “European sovereignty” goal it promotes.
Beyond Germany, France and Belgium, most of the continent still relies on national systems such as Bancontact in Belgium, Bizum in Spain or Vipps MobilePay in the Nordics — all operating separately.
Jonathan Romain, chief marketing officer at Belgium’s Payconiq by Bancontact — which runs the country’s main domestic card and mobile-payment network — said the picture is often misunderstood.
“Not all payment cards are American,” he said. “In Belgium alone there are 18 million Bancontact debit cards, used at home and abroad free of charge.”
Romain argued that Europe already has strong home-grown systems that work and that the real challenge is co-ordination rather than invention.
“These networks were built nationally and reflect local habits,” he said. “What Europe needs is better connection between them — not a single new structure from the centre.”
His comments echo a wider view among banks that sovereignty in payments will come from linking existing European systems rather than replacing them. In that sense, fragmentation is both a weakness and a mark of diversity: The technology exists but Europe still needs to make its own networks talk to one another.
To bridge those gaps, EPI recently signed an agreement with the EuroPA alliance to link 15 national networks. Banks lauded that as a realistic step toward interoperability.
But the ECB notes the patchwork still falls short of a single European system — and that its own digital euro, for all its cost, is designed precisely to overcome that fragmentation.
