European Central Bank board member Piero Cipollone was back on the wires last Thursday promising that “by early 2026” politicians will have nailed down the legislation for their CBDC: a digital euro – news framed as a decisive push after months of drift.
On paper the goal is bold: finish parliamentary wrangling, publish the rulebook and leave officials just “two to three years” to ship a retail wallet. In practice the announcement felt like the latest rerun of a show that keeps changing its finale date while half the audience slips out for coffee.
A deadline in search of demand
Lawmakers are dragging their feet for a reason. A January Reuters deep-dive revealed that many parliamentarians and commercial bankers remain unconvinced the project solves an actual consumer problem and fear it could divert deposits from an already fragile banking system. The ECB tries to mollify them with low holding caps, but that only shrinks the digital euro’s practical use-case: if citizens can park just a couple of thousand euros, why switch from the card or mobile-banking app they already trust?
Consumers seem to agree. A 17-country survey published by the ECB in March found that 58 percent of respondents who had just watched an explainer video still said it was “unlikely or very unlikely” they would use a digital euro for everyday retail payments; in the control group that scepticism jumped to 69 percent. When asked why, 43 percent answered simply: I prefer other payment methods. Habit may be hard to break, but those numbers suggest indifference, not ignorance, is the main obstacle.
Payments déjà vu all over again
Proponents argue the euro area needs sovereign e-cash to avoid dependence on U.S. card giants and, now, dollar-backed stablecoins encouraged by President Trump. Yet the region already boasts SEPA Instant Credit, domestic card schemes such as France’s Carte Bancaire and a flourishing patchwork of mobile wallets. These rails may be fragmented but they work, and fees on intra-EU retail payments are already among the lowest in the G-20. The digital euro, by contrast, still lacks a settled business model for intermediaries and would arrive just as banks spend billions upgrading to ISO 20022 and faster payments anyway.
Political will versus political risk
Cipollone’s 2026 deadline is meant to light a fire under the European Parliament and Council, but politics cuts both ways. Elections loom in Germany and Spain, where right-of-centre parties routinely frame the digital euro as a privacy hazard in the making. Brussels insists transaction data will be pseudonymised and kept off ECB servers, yet the public-consultation cycle that closed in 2021 showed privacy was by far the top concern – outranking cyber-security, offline access or smart-contract features. Months later that sentiment has not budged.
Bank lobbying is louder still. The European Banking Federation warns that a risk-free ECB wallet could drain as much as 15 percent of retail deposits in a crisis, raising funding costs just when margins are already compressed by six straight rate cuts. Supervisors say holding caps and tiered remuneration will mitigate flight, but the optics of a state-run product cannibalising the private sector are politically poisonous in Berlin and Rome.
Tech ambitions meet user inertia
Even if the legal framework passes, engineering a product that people actually choose is another matter. The ECB promises near-cash privacy for offline transactions, but QR payments and NFC taps are already universal. It touts programmable payments for e-commerce, yet merchants can add conditional triggers to SEPA Instant today. And while cross-border settlement could be cheaper on a multi-CBDC corridor, the digital euro is retail-only – wholesale pilots remain a separate discussion.
History suggests adoption hinges on convenience, not ideology: Swedes embraced Swish because it made splitting a lunch bill painless; mainland Chinese flocked to Alipay because it bundled payments with shopping. By comparison, a digital euro that purposefully limits balances, earns no interest and requires yet another app may feel like less than what consumers already have, not more.
The road to 2026 – or another extension?
For now, Brussels is signalling urgency, but the parliamentary docket is crowded with defence funds and green-industrial policy. Lobbyists whisper that even if a first-reading agreement sneaks through this year, national capitals could still stall in the Council, stretching Cipollone’s early-2026 target into a new “ambitious but realistic” horizon.
Scepticism is healthy; so is honesty. Europe absolutely needs resilient, home-grown payment infrastructure. What is not yet clear is whether a retail CBDC – especially one constrained to avoid rocking the banking boat – is the mechanism consumers or merchants actually want. Until that demand story firms up, the digital euro risks becoming the monetary equivalent of Europe’s space plane projects: technically intriguing, strategically appealing, but always five years from commercial lift-off.
I’ll keep watching the legislative ticker – and the opinion polls. Wake me when more Europeans want a digital euro than a latte with their contactless card.