Central Bank of Cyprus convenes first digital euro session with payment service providers and urges engagement with the Digital Euro Rulebook

The Central Bank of Cyprus held its first special session with banks, payment institutions and electronic money institutions on the digital euro, as work on the project advances alongside legislative negotiations in Brussels on the Single Currency Package. Governor Christodoulos Patsalides framed the digital euro as part of strengthening Europe’s resilience, including reducing Cyprus’s dependence on non-European payment providers, and called on payment service providers to familiarise themselves with the Digital Euro Rulebook and assess implications for digitalisation, innovation and business models. Central bank officials outlined the project’s current status, near-term decisions and the Single Currency Package provisions relevant to payment service providers as future distributors and recipients of the digital euro, including the use of the digital euro platform to help private payment solutions scale on a pan-European basis. European Central Bank representative Patrick Papsdorf presented ongoing work on the rulebook to establish a single set of standards, procedures and rules for digital euro payments across the euro area, covering eligibility, onboarding, obligations, termination or suspension of participation and breach procedures, alongside draft minimum user experience standards, illustrative usage scenarios and end-to-end process flows, as well as core service design topics such as access management, liquidity and transaction processing. The Governor also encouraged wider Cypriot participation in the second cycle of experimental activities on the European Central Bank’s innovation platform, and a roundtable with central bank representatives from Greece, Estonia, Austria and Cyprus discussed costs, network effects, risks, resilience and market readiness for digital euro adoption.