• ECB selecting banks that want to take part in pilot phase

• ECB setup costs to reach around 1.3 bln euros, Cipollone says

• Banks to pocket fees, won't have to pay system costs to ECB

• Merchants will also have an incentive in terms of cap on fees

that is about 3% of what they spend every year on IT‑system maintenance," Cipollone said.

Just to put the number into context.

Sounds like a good idea to get away from mastercard and visa and the like. They are beholden to the US and will continue to abuse their market position for their callous goals. Not that the EU is a trustworthy player but they will at least have their own representatives trying to get over on them and not American ones.

Banks = shit, not ALL but most.. right now we should be getting away from US, but wouldn't be surprised when AI bubble pops we suffer repercussions because our banks also had money there

Plus. What's this about fees? There shouldn't be fees

That's incredibly cheap. Crazy how long it took to get to this point.

I couldn't agree more. I don't know much about European banks, but the American ones are some of the worst companies in the world, since 1999 when they cancelled the depression era rules that prevented them from operating nationally and mixing investment and commerical banks, and importantly where they cancelled a provision that the writer of a security, like a mortgage, had to hold a percentage of that security until maturity, to give them incentive to write good loans and not fob them off on suckers.

It worked, until they cancelled it. Big banks gouge us with fees, they try to overdraft us. I always canceled overdraft protection and they reinsitute it every year without explicitly telling you. If you depositing money, then made withdrawals, they would not clear your check, for the purposes of charging you multiple overdraft fees after 2008. Like normally a paycheck would be available at least party right away, but they were maximizing fee revenue, and made billions extra in fees after 2008 when our tax dollars bailed them out for their perversions of the market.

I use credit unions, I can't overstate how much I hate big banks, for so many reasons.

American banks are the worst in the world. Don't get me wrong, it's not some utopia here in the EU. Banks here will pull as much bullshit as they're legally allowed to, but the difference is there's more consumer protection.

I think this is quite a naive perspective on banks.
You don't want them making investments, yet you also don't want to pay fees? How is that supposed to work? Do you want to pay for your banking services directly?

It's not going to cost them net anything though. 4b to setup and then fees for as long as the currency lasts...so they'll recoup all their costs and then it'll be free money

You don’t want them making investments, yet you also don’t want to pay fees?

Correct.

As of January 2026, there were a total of 4,633 credit institutions operating in the European Union

So that 6 billion is 1,3 million per bank spread over 4 years. So 323.764€ per year. That actually sounds unrealisticly cheap.

I don't want them making high investments on foreign assets, don't expose too much, invest within europe, why not invest in infrastructure building or maintenance? It's infrastructure so it's needed.. ROI is low? Probably because there's less risk

Perhaps it's 4-6 billion each.

That sounds cheaper than fees to other systems.

Surely they should be doing a bit of all of that, that's how you reduce risk with investments.

And in General more regulations to stop banks from going completely crazy.

Yes, lend money to people to buy houses or start businesses.. everything has risk but don't expose too much to the inflated US market

Thinking that banks need to collect a fee for small money transfers it's not seeing how big banks really are

Also, some European countries use mostly VISA and others mostly Mastercard. It's unreliable and a hassle for bank users who come from one country and need to pay in another.

Komplett ungeeignet für Zahlungen unter 20€ oder so

Der Energieverbrauch ist extrem, es hat keinen Schutz vor Geldwäsche, Wallets laden extrem lange.

GNU Taler?

And we get open source apps and infrastructure for that money, right? Because independence etc?

ECB will not develop apps. ECB will offer an API and regulate and license the API access to providers like banks. The providers will then develop apps and other tools that will be accessible to users. They will have to use their own financial resources as stated in the report, which as usual won't result in open access apps. Possibly, ECB API will be an open banking API.