Introductory statement by Fabio Panetta, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament

Brussels, 24 April 2023

I am pleased to appear before this Committee again today as part of our series of hearings on the digital euro project.

We are now entering the final stage of the investigation phase of the project. The ECB’s Governing Council recently endorsed a third set of design options for the digital euro – design options that we have also discussed in previous hearings. Today we are thus publishing a report setting out the Eurosystem’s views on how people could access, hold and start to use the digital euro. The report also examines how the digital euro could be distributed by intermediaries as well as the services and features it could offer.^[1]

Our work in recent months has not just been about investigating technical issues. We have also held focus groups to hear from potential users of a digital euro…