On 31 March 2026, the Eurosystem issued its payments strategy outlining its vision for the evolution of Europe’s payments amid rapid technological change.
The payments strategy complements the Eurosystem’s cash strategy and extends the Eurosystem’s retail payments strategy by covering wholesale, business-to-business and cross-border payments.
The Eurosystem takes a two-pronged approach to payments: it wants to improve the existing payment infrastructures and solutions at the same time as supporting and catalysing new ones. It takes into account recent developments in tokenisation and distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the implications these may have for its own role in the payments ecosystem.
It also considers the following main payment use cases:
- Wholesale payments (large-value, time-critical transactions between banks and/or other financial market participants). The Eurosystem will continue to support and invest in its real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system T2, including by exploring the extension of its operating hours. At the same time, the Eurosystem will future-proof its infrastructure in line with technological innovation, developing central bank money for the settlement of DLT-based wholesale payments and securities transactions through its Pontes and Appia initiatives.
- Business-to-business (B2B) payments (transactions between firms, often with specific requirements related to invoicing, reconciliation and liquidity management). The Eurosystem notes that B2B payments are at the core of economic activity. The Eurosystem intends to facilitate more proactive engagement between the supply side and the corporate sector to catalyse more efficient and innovative solutions for European businesses, allowing them to more seamlessly integrate payment flows into their business processes and leverage innovations such as conditional payments.
- Retail payments (low‑value transactions between consumers and businesses or public administrations, as well as person‑to‑person transfers). With the digital euro project, the Eurosystem is adapting central bank money to the digital age. At the same time, it will continue to foster a resilient, integrated, innovative and competitive euro retail payments market with EU-governed, pan-European, market-led solutions for retail payments at the point of interaction.
- Cross-border payments outside of the EU. The Eurosystem will continue its work to shape and advance the G20 roadmap for faster, cheaper, more transparent and more inclusive cross-border payments, by both expanding the use of current efficient solutions such as the interlinking of fast payment systems and taking advantage of innovations based on tokenisation.