Nice. This also means sex workers (which are a legal and protected profession here) will finally be able to use the full range of card services without being subjected to the prudish views of Visa/Master Card. Same for adult entertainment websites and generally any service that doesn't align with the "US man in charge mindset". I think that alone makes it worth it.
Electricity, water, roads, bridges are all public infrastructure. Why should payments be any different.
Without summoning the decentralized block-based "currency" crowd, I would like to point out that in the entire lifespan of such technologies they never have received widespread institutional or legislative buy-in like this EU initiative to build a digital Euro.
While USDC and BTC have been used as defacto currencies in some countries there is truly no equivalent adoption in any meaningfully mature economic zone such as EU/NA/CN.
I welcome sovereign digital payments initiatives.
We don’t need to speculate how this will work.
India, with a population 3 times the size of the EU already did this more than half a decade ago.
And it works brilliantly.
The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.
> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”
But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.
That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.
Let me guess, this will only run on "certified" devices and not on Linux or FOSS Android phones...
Aside of the fees, another important goal is political freedom against any US sanction on our citizen.
We saw recently that ICC judges were excluded of Visa/Mastercard/... payment system
source: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
For everyone comparing an EU-wide initiative to country-specific ones keep in mind that EU is composed of 28 sovereign states. Many individual countries already have their payment systems, and have had for a long while.
It's not equivalent to India, or the US.
It'd be more comparable to ASEAN (11) or the Arab league (22).
Mixed feelings about the digital aspect of it (and thus tracking), but it is certainly time to derisk on US system dependency.
Yes please ! These kind of actions are EXACTLY what the EU / citizens need to regain trust again in international institutes, and make them feel in their immediate every day life how they benefit from them!
Hopefully, this will become a role model for other countries as well, extracting complete financially power back out of the hands of surveillance capitalism - as privacy is also a big aspect of this (nothing tracks you as confident as your transactions) !
PS: those arguing that then the "state" will be able to see your transactions: a. this wholly depends on the implemented system. I trust democratic and ruled-by-law institutions way more than financial players always operating at the most legal gray to extract most profits. b. I rather want one highly secured state financial database, than 100s of smaller ones that sell (or leak) your data (as it is right now).
PPS: Also a "Apple/Google Wallet" equivalent app mandatory on phone's should be the next logical step to cut those data-harvesters completely out of your private life.
it might work, it worked for Thailand. Yet in my experience EU solutions either work very well or fail spectacularly. Particularly when the EU commission is the main driver, they generally become just bureaucratic poodles. However I think this one will work. Yet it will take many years to build (side effect of slow-moving EU) and many more years to adoption. In any case, forget about this for at least 5 years. I do welcome it, but I think it should have happened 15 years ago and I dont understand why it took so long. And I might still be proven wrong and this won't work at all, and yet I wouldn't be surprised. But again this worked for Thailand, so in theory this could be done in EU.
Will I be able to use this to make purchases the government doesn't approve of? No? Then it is little different. Although all the stuff I want to buy that the government doesn't approve of comes from Japan and I doubt they'd accept it.
This is about the 'Digital Euro', which seems to be both:
- a central bank digital currency, and
- a system for transferring this currency between people and businesses
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
It's not clear to me that it replaces Visa/Mastercard. If you have a problem with a vendor and you've paid by card, you have a chargeback as a last resort. Not so with cash or a CBDC.
I moved from Germany to Norway and it would be awesome if they could integrate with each other. I have yet to find a way to transfer money between my Norwegian bank account and my Revolut account without substantial fees (on top of currency conversion fees).
I wish the UK won't be stupid and joins the initiative. I also do understand that the US will exert a lot of pressure on Brits to prevent this from happening.
Honestly this is a bit wierd. There already is payment network - SEPA. Many countries have instant bank transfers and i believe instant SEPA should be mandatory from 1. 1. 2026. There already are countries where it's extremely common to use QR payments (basically prefilled bank transfer). It's pushing VISA/Mastercard out.
In typical european nature the first standard was SPAYD (short payment descriptor) from Austria/Czechia/Slovakia but yeah two years later Germany/Netherlands had to come up with their different format EPC QR. But who cares the differences are trivial - just different structure of the QR string. My bank app supports both. The only thing this system needs is mandatory notification system / api so the sellers can get fast confirmation of the payment. Then again some banks already do that so you just pick right bank as seller.
Taking QR codes aside there is also Wero that is already running in many of the countries (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France). I am not sure what the hell is digital euro? Will they rename Wero to digital euro or whats going on?
> Every part of the digital euro will be built by Europeans. Every company hired to work on it must be European owned. If the ownership changes, if it falls into non-European hands, that company is dropped from the project. A substitute takes its place.
... but you need your Apple or Android phone to use it at all?
That's one way to force people to use authoritarian CBDC currency. I'm guessing the adoption estimates weren't good enough, so now a carrot will be used for a while, to entice merchants to switch. Future European dictators are silently clapping in the corners, this will give them absolute financial control and a leverage over citizens, after they will be elected on some populist promises.
This would be awesome. However, EU declaring this is a bit like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.
With the hability to see and track every payment?
bank fees will still be an issue. This thing in the works for years and years.
Better to just connect the myriad of instant bank payment systems that already exist all over europe than to invent another standard.
Finally.
Yeah I'm not willingly giving eu anything, and certainly not (more of) my money. They have a straight track record of acting against their citizens with every single thing they do.
Digital euro aka digital currency total surveillance and control
"Digital euro" sounds cute and modern though doesn't it. It'll fool many
If you criticise it you're obviously pro America and pro Visa/MasterCard or pro Russia because you obviously want the EU to fail!! It's clever to bundle it all up in one initiative
I have lost faith in European Union. All these things are just too little and too late.
Why the heck did Thailand manage to create instant payment system that works across Asian countries and European Union did not even finish similar system inside the EU?
Yes we have SEPA payments but these are useless in most payment-to-merchant type of payments across the EU.
We already should have had such system widely used and accepted across the WHOLE UNION.
I am glad we will have something but if I still need a VISA/MC card when I travel abroad ill just be constantly reminded of stupidity and inefficiency of the EU.
The insidious point, though is that it replaces the "US grip" by an "EU grip". By that I mean EU 'government' level over national states. I think that's actually the real aim like for many EU initiatives. The single curreny already pretty much nuked national sovereignty on key economic levers and this is a step further towards the dissolution of European nation states. The constant use of the term "sovereign" in Europe at the moment is highly ironic, if not a little 1984's doublespeak but people seem to swallow it hook, line, and sinker (see comments and reactions here).
The real shot across the bow, for European politicians, was the US sanctions on International Criminal Court judges [1, 2] which cut them off from Visa and Mastercard - and got one judge's (European) bank account closed, because the bank's software couldn't enforce the sanctions (which would require e.g. no transactions using the dollar in currency conversion), short of closing the account.
I think a lot of folks in Europe used to think there was some sort of red line America wouldn't cross, preferring to allow its (immensely profitable and dominant) tech companies to stay aloof of short-term "freedom fries" political squabbles. Turns out that's no longer the case, if it ever was.
[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/25639977.icc-judge-says-us... [2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...