ECB Says Digital Euro Can Outlast Lagarde

Christine Lagarde’s planned exit from the European Central Bank is not, at least in the ECB’s telling, the part that threatens the digital euro. The harder question sits in Brussels, where the law that would govern the project is still being negotiated.

At a Web Summit panel in Lisbon reported by Euronews, Alessandro Giovannini, an adviser to the programme manager of the digital euro project, said leadership changes at the ECB would not derail the plan. He described the digital euro as a “European project” rather than one belonging to the central bank alone. That matters, because authority here is split: the ECB can build the plumbing, but it still needs EU legislation to define the rules.

Lagarde is due to leave the ECB on 7 February 2027, and other senior departures are also lined up. Institutions like to say nobody is indispensable right up until succession becomes the whole meeting. In this case, the legal structure does reduce the risk of one departure freezing the project. If the Parliament and member states agree the law, the project survives the furniture moving upstairs.

The live hinge, according to Euronews, is the final phase of EU lawmaking. Parliament and the Council, with the Commission in trilogue, are still trying to settle unresolved points including how merchant fees would be calculated. That is not decorative detail. It is the business model. If retailers dislike the economics, the digital euro becomes a public infrastructure project with private reluctance attached.

Giovannini said the co-legislators remain committed to reaching agreement by the end of the year. Ireland, chairing the talks for member states, is reportedly aiming for a deal on 18 November. Until there is a deal, there is still no finished legal basis, just political intent and technical momentum.

The ECB is proceeding anyway. Euronews said it has already selected 36 banks and payment firms for a 12-month pilot due to begin in the second half of 2027, and picked network providers to connect them to the platform. Development costs before first issuance have been estimated at about €1.3 billion, with annual operating costs of about €320 million from 2029, to be borne by eurozone central banks.

Giovannini also tried to answer the oldest fear attached to central bank digital currencies: surveillance. He said offline payments would work like cash and leave no central record of who paid whom, while online payments would show banks the parties to a transaction but only pseudonymised data to the ECB. Lawmakers are still negotiating limits on offline use to address money-laundering and terrorist-financing risks. Which is another way of saying the digital euro’s promise of privacy remains subject to the same clause that governs everything else here: whatever survives the law.