Key Takeaways
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Digital euro onboarding should take under 20 minutes, while P2P transfers must take no more than 60 seconds to encourage adoption.
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Automated wallet funding and co-badged cards could remove friction and make retail payments as fast as existing card transactions.
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Despite its sovereignty benefits, the digital euro risks weak demand because many consumers prefer familiar payment methods and question why they need another option.
The European Central Bank may succeed in building a secure and resilient digital euro, but its adoption could ultimately depend on something far simpler: whether people find it easier to use than their existing payment methods.
Research from OMFIF and Imperial College London’s Centre for Financial Technology suggests that small frictions in onboarding and payments could sharply reduce usage.
Their agent-based model simulated how consumers might adopt the digital euro across retail, online and person-to-person channels.
The findings set clear benchmarks. Registration should take no longer than 20 minutes, peer-to-peer transfers should take 60 seconds or less, and in-store payments should match the roughly 12 seconds required for a conventional card transaction.
Without that level of convenience, the digital euro risks becoming a wallet that Europeans open once but rarely use again.
Slow Sign-Ups Could Undermine Digital Euro Adoption
The model identifies onboarding as an early obstacle. If users face a lengthy registration process, many may abandon it before activating their digital euro wallets.
Access through existing banking apps could reduce this problem because banks already possess the information required for know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks.
However, those apps may not offer the frictionless person-to-person experience that helped Sweden‘s Swish payment service grow.
Swish allows users to send money by selecting a contact or entering a phone number, completing transfers in around 30 seconds.
A digital euro payment requiring a QR code or copied wallet details could take approximately 60 seconds. If users must retrieve multiple bank-account numbers, the process could stretch to two minutes and become less competitive.
Separate ECB research reinforces the challenge. A working paper involving approximately 19,000 households found that explaining the digital euro through a short video temporarily increased willingness to adopt it, but most of the effect disappeared after three months.
Many respondents preferred their established payment methods and showed little interest in learning more. ECB working paper
