The European Central Bank (ECB) project to build its digital euro continues. To support its efforts, the ECB called on leading companies. Among them, Amazon, the e-commerce giant.
Amazon joins forces with the ECB
A few months ago, the ECB published a call for contributions from institutional partners for the design of a proof of concept of its digital currency. Following this, around fifty financial and technological companies expressed their interest. Finally, the European Central Bank selected five to accompany it in this adventure.
“The objective of this prototyping exercise is to test how well the technology behind a digital euro integrates with the prototypes developed by the companies. […] There are no plans to reuse the prototypes in later phases of the digital euro project.”, clarified the ECB.
In reality, each of the partners will be responsible for developing an interface that corresponds to a scenario for using the digital euro.
In this case, it is the American multinational Amazon which will ensure the construction of the electronic payment system planned by the project. This project is supposed to start during this month and be completed in December.
What about other partners?
Among the other companies selected, we find the financial services company CaixaBank. Which will develop a P2P payment solution online based on the digital euro. More specifically, it will work on the deployment of a mobile application that will reproduce the consumer journey. This includes transfers to their own account and/or to third parties.
For its part, the French company Worldline is in charge of carrying out the P2P offline payment project. As for the Italian company Nexi, it will work on point-of-sale payments at the recipient’s initiative. And finally, EPI will take care of donor-initiated in-store payments.
The ECB started the euro digitization project in 2021. Since then, the institution has been in its research phase, which provides for the creation of a viable prototype. The current feasibility study will continue until 2023. At that time, the bank will assess the protocols developed by its staff and report on its observations.
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