The European Central Bank published its Annual Report 2025 and a broad set of Governing Council decisions, led by the legal implementation of its December 2025 policy change to remunerate all excess reserves at the deposit facility rate from 17 June 2026, regardless of whether the funds are held in reserve accounts or placed in the deposit facility. The package also advances digital euro and tokenised wholesale central bank money work, moves the Integrated Reporting Framework and Analytics and Data projects into the realisation phase, and includes new supervisory and statistical measures. In payments and market infrastructure, the ECB published a comprehensive payments strategy covering wholesale, business-to-business, retail and cross-border payments, approved the Appia Steering Group mandate for the tokenised wholesale central bank money programme spanning the Pontes and Appia projects, and approved the first three participation agreements with CPACE, nexo and Berlin Group for standards to be used in front-end processing of digital euro online payments. It also set the ECB and national central bank roles for the digital euro pilot and approved a template participation agreement for payment service providers. On data and supervision, an amended securities holdings guideline requires more frequent and more timely transmission of individual investor-level data for key financial sectors and removes obsolete reporting requirements, while the ECB imposed a EUR 6.2 million administrative penalty on BofA Securities Europe SA for wrongly calculated market risk-weighted assets and confirmed a streamlined process for changes to banks' internal credit risk models from 1 October 2026. The Governing Council also cleared for publication a macroprudential report on non-bank financial intermediation focused on asset management, published the Eurosystem response to the European Commission consultation on the competitiveness of the EU banking sector, and approved a euro area financial integration and structures report for publication on 7 May 2026. The Integrated Reporting Framework implementation plan and milestones are expected by June 2026, and the digital euro pilot is due to start in the second half of 2027.
European Central Bank 2026-05-04
European Central Bank sets 17 June 2026 start for excess reserves to be paid at deposit facility rate and advances digital euro preparations
The European Central Bank published its Annual Report 2025 and a package of Governing Council decisions, including the legal implementation of its December 2025 policy to remunerate all excess reserves at the deposit facility rate from 17 June 2026. The decisions advance work on the digital euro and tokenised wholesale central bank money, move the Integrated Reporting Framework and Analytics and Data projects into the realisation phase, tighten securities holdings reporting, and impose a EUR 6.2 million penalty on BofA Securities Europe SA. The Governing Council also approved a comprehensive payments strategy and key arrangements for the digital euro pilot.