Piero Cipollone
Member of the ECB Executive Board overseeing digital euro development and payments infrastructure.
Last refreshed: 27 May 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Will Piero Cipollone deliver Europe's first central-bank digital currency before CAIDA even passes?
Timeline for Piero Cipollone
Confirmed PSP selection for the 12-month digital euro pilot will finalise in June 2026
European Tech Sovereignty: Digital euro stays on its own track- Who is Piero Cipollone at the ECB?
- Piero Cipollone is an ECB Executive Board member appointed in October 2023. A former deputy governor of the Bank of Italy, he oversees the Digital Euro project, the Pontes DLT settlement layer, and the ECB's payments infrastructure portfolio.Source: ECB
- When will the digital euro pilot start?
- ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone confirmed that payment-service-provider selection for the 12-month Digital Euro pilot will finalise in June 2026, with the Pontes DLT settlement layer scheduled for Q3 2026.Source: ECB
- What is the Pontes initiative and who leads it?
- Pontes is the ECB's distributed-ledger technology settlement solution for the Digital Euro, scheduled to launch in Q3 2026. It falls under Piero Cipollone's portfolio on the ECB Executive Board.Source: ECB
Background
Piero Cipollone was appointed to the ECB Executive Board in October 2023, filling the seat previously held by Fabio Panetta. An Italian economist and former deputy governor of the Bank of Italy, he oversees the ECB's Digital Euro development work and payments infrastructure portfolio. His confirmation that payment-service-provider selection for the Digital Euro's 12-month pilot will finalise in June 2026 marked one of the clearest public timelines the ECB has given for the project.
Cipollone's portfolio includes supervising the Pontes initiative, the ECB's distributed-ledger technology settlement layer for tokenised-asset settlement, scheduled for Q3 2026. He also oversees the technical standards work that led to the April 2026 agreements with ECPC, nexo standards and the Berlin Group, embedding open interoperability protocols into the Digital Euro infrastructure. Within the ECB Executive Board, he sits alongside Christine Lagarde (President) and Luis de Guindos (Vice President) on the six-person body that handles day-to-day institutional management.
The Digital Euro is broadly considered Cipollone's signature project at the ECB. Its advancing-on-mandate character -- needing no Commission legislative act -- is directly attributable to the ECB's institutional autonomy, and Cipollone has been the public face of that progress. The contrast with CAIDA, which requires Commission consensus and faces US trade opposition, is implicit in every ECB communication on the Digital Euro timeline.
