On 14 July 2026 the European Central Bank named the 36 payment service providers selected to run the digital euro pilot, chosen from more than 50 applicants after a call for expression of interest in March.
The number is not the story. The names are. Adyen, Stripe, Nexi, Worldline, SumUp, PAYONE, Satispay and Revolut are all on the list, alongside banks including Deutsche Bank, UniCredit, BPCE and Poste Italiane. For most European merchants, at least one of those is already somewhere in the checkout stack.
Digital euro acquiring PSPs are the merchant side of the pilot
The ECB splits the 36 into two roles. Distributing PSPs give users a beta digital euro account and the ability to pay. Acquiring PSPs serve selected merchants and enable them to receive digital euro payments. Some firms do both.
That second role is the one worth watching. It is the first concrete specification of how acceptance actually reaches a merchant, and it arrives through the acquirer relationship you already have rather than through a new counterparty you would have to go and sign.
The caveats are real. The pilot runs a beta digital euro that is functionally close to the draft legislation but carries no legal tender status, and it does not begin until the second half of 2027. Testing covers person to person payments and person to business, at physical points of sale and in ecommerce. Nothing here obliges any merchant to accept anything. The mandatory acceptance question still sits with the legislators, where the Parliament vote left it.
ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone, who chairs the High Level Task Force on a digital euro, said the strong market interest “shows the private sector’s readiness to engage actively and quickly advance with the digital euro project.”
Why it matters
Merchants will not adopt the digital euro the way they adopted iDEAL or Bancontact, by evaluating a rail and choosing to integrate it. If your acquirer is on this list, acceptance is being specified into rails you already run, on a timeline set in Frankfurt. The useful question for 2027 is not whether to support it. It is what your processor will charge you to, and what refunds and disputes look like on a payment that carries no chargeback right.
Merchants going live in Europe should read this next to the rest of the EU payments stack, and against the account to account rails already taking volume off cards.
- European Central Bank, “ECB selects 36 payment service providers to join digital euro pilot,” press release, 14 July 2026.
- European Central Bank, “Digital euro pilot,” list of the 36 selected payment service providers, accessed 14 July 2026.