The European Central Bank has selected three open standards for digital euro payments at the point of sale (PoS), signing agreements with the ECPC, nexo standards and the Berlin Group. A key context for the selection is the digital euro’s aim of ensuring European sovereignty over payments infrastructure.
The most consequential choice is the adoption of CPACE, the contactless payment standard developed by Europe’s ECPC consortium. CPACE supports NFC contactless payments and is already used by several domestic card schemes including France’s Cartes Bancaires and Germany’s girocard. Its selection is central to the sovereignty theme because the standard it aims to displace is EMVCo, the dominant global terminal standard owned by six card schemes. Four of the six, Amex, Discover, Mastercard and Visa, are American. JCB is Japanese and UnionPay is Chinese. None are European, yet EMVCo standards are used in over 98% of EU card transactions at the point of sale.
The ECB’s announcement frames the selection around cost savings, stating that leveraging existing open standards “minimises adoption costs for the market.” It also noted that “Europe currently lacks a universally available open standard supported across payment terminals and depends heavily on proprietary standards owned by international card schemes and global digital wallets.”
A key question is the extent of terminal upgrades required and the coordination involved. According to EAST, the European Association for Secure Transactions, there were 21.4 million PoS terminals deployed across Europe at the end of 2025. The only CPACE deployment figure available is from an early 2023 ECPC announcement referencing “hundreds of thousands” of compatible terminals, at a time when European terminals totaled roughly 16 million. We have requested updated data from the ECPC.
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