The Necessity of Digital Euro Readiness

The digital euro represents a once-in-a-generation shift in how money moves across Europe, with wide-ranging implications for retail payments, wholesale settlement, customer ownership, and the economics of banking infrastructure.

For banks, this is not simply another regulatory programme. It is a strategic infrastructure transition that will determine how public money is accessed digitally, how customer relationships are retained, and how liquidity and settlement services are monetised.

Early readiness creates clear advantages. Banks can strengthen customer retention through their digital wallet interface, reducing customer outflow to more advanced providers through improved technology adoption, and materially lower costs across cash and payments infrastructure. Cash-related operating costs could be materially reduced, by up to 50%, as digital euro adoption scales. At the same time, more efficient liquidity management becomes possible—enabling the move from batch-based systems to always-on settlement and opening the door to new treasury and liquidity optimisation services.

The digital euro is designed to complement cash, not replace it, providing a trusted form of public money for the digital economy. Banks and PSPs will remain central to distribution, onboarding, wallet servicing, and customer experience.

However, readiness requires targeted change across customer and wallet lifecycle management, payments and settlement, liquidity and treasury operations, and data and control environments. These changes do not require parallel systems, but instead an integration layer that cross communicates and aligns platform capabilities across the bank.

Becoming digital euro ready does not require a full rebuild of banking architecture. The most effective route is a modular, minimally invasive integration layer that sits on top of existing systems.

This matters for three reasons:

• It limits near-term resource consumption and implementation risk
• It preserves flexibility as regulatory and market dynamics evolve
• It creates an orchestration layer across wallets, payments, liquidity and controls

In practice, this is not wholesale replacement but controlled enablement—putting in place the foundation for readiness today while maintaining scalability for the future.

The digital euro should be viewed as an infrastructure opportunity rather than a standalone product. Delayed or insufficient adoption creates structural disadvantages across customer ownership, cost efficiency, and liquidity management.

The primary risk is not deposit loss alone, but losing the customer relationship. If banks fail to offer a seamless digital euro wallet experience, customers will migrate to alternative providers—as has already happened in digital payments.

Today, platforms such as PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay already account for around 34% of online payments in Europe. Nearly 72% of Europeans use mobile wallets, and the market is expected to triple over the next decade.

Under the ECB model, banks remain well positioned to retain interchange revenue, avoid paying fees to BigTech wallet providers, and stay at the centre of the customer relationship. However, this depends on delivering a competitive, customer-first wallet experience.

Failure to do so results in revenue shifting to third-party providers, reduced visibility into customer behaviour, and weakened ability to cross-sell and monetise future services. This is ultimately about owning the customer interface. Banks that move early can strengthen relationships and unlock new revenue streams; those that delay risk becoming invisible in the digital money ecosystem.

Cash infrastructure remains expensive and is declining in use. ATM operating costs range between €15,000 and €25,000 per machine annually. Germany alone operates around 51,000 ATMs, down from approximately 60,000 in 2015. Total cash handling costs in Germany reach around €10.8 billion annually, or roughly €130 per capita, while global cash logistics costs are estimated at €152 billion.

At an individual bank level, a network of 500 ATMs represents an annual cost of €7.5 million to €12.5 million. Even a 20% reduction in footprint could release €1.5 million to €2.5 million per year.

Digital euro readiness enables a gradual transition toward a digital cash-equivalent, allowing banks to reduce ATM networks over time, simplify cash handling operations, and lower cost-to-income ratios without compromising access. This positions the digital euro as a structural cost optimisation lever, not just a compliance requirement.

The third value lever lies in improved liquidity visibility and orchestration.

In retail banking, the opportunity is shaped by holding limits, which are expected to sit around €3,000 to €4,000 per individual. Without such limits, deposits could potentially move out of banks at scale—up to €1 trillion. Even within these constraints, real-time visibility into wallet balances provides a clearer view of available liquidity, enabling improved treasury optimisation, collateral usage, and liquidity solutions.

The larger opportunity sits in wholesale banking. Tokenised central bank money is expected to transform settlement processes, enabling faster delivery-versus-payment transactions, more efficient cross-currency payment flows, improved repo and collateral mobility, and enhanced intraday liquidity management within central bank systems such as TARGET.

Banks that can manage liquidity seamlessly across these domains will be able to optimise balance sheet deployment, develop new structured treasury products, and generate incremental revenue from settlement and collateral services.

Digital euro readiness therefore creates a platform for new, balance sheet-driven revenue opportunities—not just compliance alignment.

Because the digital euro impacts architecture, operations, and commercial models simultaneously, banks need an approach that proves value early.

A combined strategy and pilot model allows banks to define their role and roadmap, validate integration and control frameworks, and test priority use cases in real conditions. This reduces risk while accelerating time to value and avoiding overinvestment as standards evolve.

The digital euro creates a clear opportunity for banks to retain control of the customer interface, rebalance the economics of cash infrastructure, and unlock new liquidity and settlement revenue pools.

Banks that act early can implement these capabilities on their own terms within a modular and controlled architecture. Those that delay risk revenue leakage to third-party providers, higher transformation costs under compressed timelines, and reduced control over both customer relationships and liquidity positioning.

Publicis Sapient supports banks end-to-end, from strategy through to the implementation of a modular integration architecture designed to work with, rather than replace, existing systems.

This enables banks to achieve readiness without large-scale disruption, orchestrate digital euro capabilities across the enterprise, and capture both cost efficiencies and new commercial value pools, while maintaining long-term architectural flexibility.