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EU Finance Ministers Agree on Roadmap for Digital Euro

By  |  September 21, 2025
EU economics David S Evans

In another step toward establishing Europe’s economic and digital sovereignty, European Union finance ministers on Friday agreed on a roadmap for launching a digital euro backed by the European Central Bank that would be independent of the U.S.-based Visa and Mastercard systems.

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    The European Commission first proposed a digital euro currency in 2023, but discussions heated up last year, according to Reuters, as the drive to reduce Europe’s dependence on U.S. and other non-EU technologies gathered momentum. The discussions recently have ratcheted up further, per Reuters, in response to President Trump’s global push for stablecoins pegged to the U.S. dollar.

    The finance ministers met Friday in Copenhagen along with ECB President Christine Lagarde and European Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis to finalize the roadmap.

    The agreement ensures that national finance ministers will have a say on whether and when the ECB would issue the currency and on how much digital euros residents will be able to hold. Their input was considered crucial to assuage fears that a digital currency could lead to a run on traditional bank deposits.

    “The compromise that we reached is that before the ECB makes a final decision in relation to issuance…there would be an opportunity for a discussion in the Council of Ministers,” Paschal Donohoe, who chairs meetings of finance ministers, told a joint press conference.

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    Before the European Commission’s proposal could be adopted in needs to be signed off on by the European Parliament and European Council, made up of equal representation of the EU member countries. The Council aims to complete its work on the proposal by the end of 2026, according to Reuters. The ECB hopes to have legislation in place by June.

    Read more: Draghi Calls for Pause on Implementing EU’s AI Act, ‘Radical Simplification’ of GDPR

    Some EU countries currently have their own digital currencies, but none are accepted across the entire 27-nation bloc.

    “The digital Europe is not just a means of payment, it is also a political statement concerning the sovereignty of Europe and its capacity to handle payment, including on a cross-border basis, with a European infrastructure and solution,” Lagarde said at the press conference.

    As in the U.S., some European bankers have expressed concern that a fiat-backed digital currency would drain funds from traditional banks, limiting their ability to make loans in fiat and undercutting the traditional financial system.

    In response to the Commission’s original proposal in 2023, Finance Watch, a non-profit advocacy group founded in 2011 as a counterweight to financial industry lobbying, warned that a digital currency could also harm consumer privacy by enabling government financial surveillance, Reuters reported at the time.

    The ECB said last year that privacy would be an important design feature of the digital euro, according to Reuters. The digital euro would not be programmable, like limited-use digital vouchers, and it would not give governments the ability to track individuals’ spending, ECB digital euro chief Evelien Witlox said.