Piero Cipollone on European Central Bank (ECB)

Piero Cipollone, as a Member of the ECB's Executive Board, places significant emphasis on the role of the European Central Bank in preserving and strengthening the euro area’s monetary sovereignty, especially amid growing geopolitical and technological shifts. His core position is that the Eurosystem must act decisively to reduce external dependencies in critical areas like digital retail payments and digital finance. He views the development of the digital euro as integral to ensuring central bank money remains fit for purpose, complementary to cash, and serves as a vital European public option anchored by European technology and infrastructure, which can also support private payment solutions via open standards.

This focus on sovereignty extends to wholesale transactions, where he supports initiatives like Project Pontes to offer tokenised central bank money settlement for digital asset transactions on Distributed Ledger Technology. This proactive stance is framed not as protectionism, but as a necessary measure to maintain economic security and competitiveness by preventing reliance on non-euro denominated settlement assets, such as US dollar-denominated stablecoins. Cipollone contends that addressing these dependencies through digital innovation is also a path to dynamic economic efficiency, resilience, and retaining control over the euro area's economic destiny in the digital era.