Frankfurt am Main, 15 June 2026

ECB President Christine Lagarde opened a conference on money in transition by recalling how medieval European fairs once enabled integrated settlement across borders without physical coin transport. Merchants from Flanders and Italy cleared debts on paper at these events, showing early potential for a unified financial system that later faded due to rising costs and shifting routes.

Lagarde noted that Europe has progressed significantly with the euro and supporting systems, yet new pressures demand attention. Technology through tokenisation is transforming exchanges and settlements, while geopolitics elevates control over financial infrastructure as a matter of sovereignty.

These shifts present opportunities for Europe to overcome long-standing fragmentation in capital markets and foster pan-European competition in retail payments. The Eurosystem pursues a broad strategy to capitalise on them, beginning with wholesale markets where multiple record-keepers inflate costs and encourage domestic bias.

Tokenisation can consolidate ownership records on shared ledgers for simultaneous payment and securities transfer with built-in settlement terms. Projects like Pontes will enable central bank money settlement for tokenised deals this year, while Appia develops blueprints for a single European tokenised finance market.

In retail payments, the digital euro aims to maintain public access to central bank money amid declining cash use and to break reliance on foreign card networks that dominate over 60 percent of transactions. Its legal tender status and open standards could enable widespread acceptance and equal competition for European providers.

For cross-border payments, the Eurosystem links its TIPS instant system with global networks including India's UPI and others in Asia and Switzerland to enable faster, sovereign transfers. Lagarde stressed that deeper integration at home will strengthen the euro's global role, requiring market investment, shared standards and supportive government frameworks to avoid new legal divisions.

She concluded that Europe must extend its single settlement system into the tokenised era to prevent fragmentation and sustain unity.