In early June 2026, Piero Cipollone, a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank told the European Parliament that the digital euro is moving faster than many people realise. The truth of the matter is most consumers will be unaware of the imminent arrival of the digital euro. It promises to deliver very little they cannot already do. Payments in Europe are already digital, instant, widely accepted and, for the most part, completely safe. The clearest consumer benefit on offer is offline resilience, a scenario most people meet rarely, if ever. Nevertheless, cooperation agreements with three European standard-setting bodies were signed in May and more than 50 payment service providers have applied to join the pilot, with selections announced in July and the pilot itself due to start in the second half of 2027. The European Central Bank (ECB) wants the Single Currency Package adopted by January 2027, in time for the 25th anniversary of euro banknotes. As the digital euro project is no longer hypothetical, that makes this a good moment to ask why the banks are signing up for something that consumers don’t even know if they want.For the banks, it is undoubtedly a geopolitical decision. The stablecoin market is overwhelmingly dollar-denominated and runs largely on North American platforms and European banks want a euro alternative. The resilience argument for an offline-capable public currency carries weight too. The question is whether Europe repeats a mistake it has made before when it comes to rolling out financial innovations.Will banks learn verification lessons from the past?Some key high profile payments innovations of the past two decades launched with speed and reach as their main objectives, and added identity verification only after fraud arrived. For instance, the UK introduced Faster Payments in 2008. Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud grew into an epidemic costing hundreds of millions of pounds a year, yet Confirmation of Payee - the simple check that the account name matches the account number - did not arrive until 2019.When name-checking was introduced on Dutch payments in 2017, reported fraud on protected transactions fell by 81 per cent. The fraud did not vanish, though. It rerouted to institutions that had not implemented the check.Europe has taken some of this on board. The Instant Payments Regulation was the first major rail to mandate Verification Of Payee - the euro-zone equivalent of Confirmation of Payee. The question is whether the digital euro keeps that discipline, or whether verification is added later.Privacy vs protectionThis is where the digital euro's two headline objectives run into a limit. Online, there is no real tension. Real-time Verification Of Payee is technically straightforward, banks across Europe have run since October 2025, and consumers are likely to expect it on a digital euro exactly as they get it on instant payments today.Offline is the hard case. A digital euro built to work like cash, without connectivity, cannot run a real-time name check at the moment of payment. It can offer cash-like privacy, but not the real-time verification consumers increasingly take for granted online. Consumers deserve to be told that, rather than promised both protections and given a product that delivers one.If consumers expect to know who they are paying, businesses have even less margin, because in B2B settlement the checking is increasingly absent altogether. A digital euro is programmable money: conditional settlement, machine-to-machine transactions, payments that execute automatically when a document or a delivery confirms. That is much of the appeal for businesses, and also the problem.In B2B payments, where invoice fraud and business email compromise already cost billions a year, a human looking at a payment before it leaves is often the last line of defence — and automation removes exactly that. A fraudulent instruction that settles instantly and conditionally, with no one in the loop, completes before anyone can question it. Automate the payment layer without building verification into the initiation layer, and you do not remove invoice fraud. You industrialise it.I remain to be convinced that the business case has been developed fully. Organizations are being asked to ready their systems for programmable settlement, ideally there would be a clear answer about what they are preparing for. But verification cannot wait for that answer. Whatever architecture Europe chooses, banks and consumers will expect digital euro payments to protect them at least as well as the rails they already use. Verification Of Payee is now the baseline expectation for account-to-account payments in Europe.The rulebook is being drafted now, and the pilot is 18 months away. None of this is a technology problem. Real-time identity matching works at scale, banks across Europe have run it for years, and the Instant Payments Regulation has shown it can be mandated. What is undecided is whether Europe builds these protections in from day one or bolts them on years later.No#DigitalEuroMarcel RientiesChief Innovation Officer and Co-FounderSurePay01 Jul, 2026