The European Central Bank opened applications on September 28, 2026, for companies to join the next phase of its digital euro innovation platform, a program designed to examine whether AI agents could one day use a future digital euro for payments and interact with each other.
The application window closes on November 9, 2026, at 17:00 CET, with selected work beginning in early 2027. The central bank structured the program in two tracks: a hands-on experimentation track running from January to June 2027, and thematic workshops examining future technologies.
Companies in the experimentation track will build working payment prototypes across four areas: electronic receipts, multiparty transactions, conditional payments, and new payment app features. The ECB emphasized that conditional payments are distinct from programmable money and that a digital euro would not be money restricted to particular products, merchants, or periods.
The workshop track will take place at the ECB’s Frankfurt headquarters in the first and second quarters of 2027. Topics include AI-enabled payments, micropayments, machine-to-machine interactions, and use of the digital euro in public services. The central bank wants participants to apply privacy-by-design principles, user control, and data protection when proposing AI-enabled payment functions.
Separately, the ECB has already selected 36 payment service providers for an independent 12-month pilot starting in the second half of 2027. The group includes Deutsche Bank, Revolut Bank, Stripe Technology Europe, UniCredit, Adyen, and SumUp. The pilot will use a beta digital euro without legal tender status to test person-to-person payments, point-of-sale purchases, e-commerce payments, and mobile transactions.
Any actual digital euro issuance remains dependent on European Union legislation and a separate ECB decision. The ECB targets readiness for a possible first issuance during 2029. The European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee approved its position on the core digital euro proposal in June 2026, but the full legislative process is still required.
