Europe’s Central Bank Suffers 2 Payments Outages in 1 Week

The European Central Bank’s payment system has experienced two outages in one week.

The bank’s T2 system suffered an outage early Monday (July 6) delaying settlement in euros and Danish crowns, according to a notice on the European Central Bank (ECB) website. The issue was resolved in under an hour, and followed a similar incident June 29.

A spokesperson for the ECB told Reuters that both outages were caused by a recent software update, which had “introduced an issue ‌that has now been addressed,” while adding that systems were operating ​normally.

The Reuters report notes that a hardware failure shut down T2 for seven hours last year, delaying salaries ​and welfare payments for thousands of people in the European Union, along with some ‌financial market transactions.

In other news from the European payments world, PYMNTS spoke with Taurus Co-Founder and Managing Partner Lamine Brahimi about the implications of a recently approved plan by the European Central Bank to launch a digital euro by 2029.

“The current way that money movement is being done is being totally rearchitected,” Brahimi told PYMNTS in an interview published Monday.

“Most credit card payments in the Eurozone are held through American credit card schemes. And for me, the digital euro is a way to provide an alternative,” he said.

The result, PYMNTS added, is not a single future of money, but “a sorting process.”

As that report pointed out, the debate around digital money has been framed as a contest among central bank digital currencies, tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Brahimi argued that it’s something specific: a market beginning to separate into distinct layers, each addressing different problems for a different customer base.

“Those are very different animals,” he said, in reference to the digital euro, tokenized bank deposits and stablecoins, noting that “the digital euro is not necessarily blockchain based.”

That distinction is important, PYMNTS wrote, as the next phase of digital money may not be defined by a single format, but by the coexistence of sovereign money, commercial bank money and freely transferable on-chain money.

Even more important is the counterparty behind the digital euro, said Brahimi, as a consumer or business holding the currency would hold a claim on a central bank, not a commercial one.

“You or me, as a holder of digital euro, we will have technically the counterparty risk of the central bank, which is by definition zero,” he said.