ECPC

ECPC (European Cards Payment Consortium) is a Brussels-based standards body representing European card-payment schemes and processors, working to define interoperability specifications for card-based payments across the EU. It brings together issuing banks, acquiring banks, and card-scheme operators to develop and maintain shared technical standards for payment terminal communication, card data formats and transaction authorisation flows.

On 24 April 2026 the ECB signed a technical standards agreement with ECPC, alongside nexo standards and the Berlin Group, to establish open interoperability standards as the foundation for Digital Euro payments. The agreement commits ECPC's existing card-payment specifications as reference frameworks for the Digital Euro's point-of-interaction infrastructure, allowing merchants and banks already compliant with ECPC standards to onboard the digital euro without proprietary integration work.

The strategic logic is EU payment sovereignty: by anchoring the Digital Euro on European-defined open standards rather than Visa, Mastercard or US-hosted payment rails, the ECB ensures that Europe's central-bank currency remains Independent of private US network operators at the infrastructure layer. ECPC's participation is the card-payments link in that sovereignty chain.