After many insightful discussions last week at Payments Tomorrow in Paris, one thing is clear: the European payment landscape is shifting, and the questions are getting harder. A common question that comes up is how the upcoming digital euro fits alongside the current open banking rails we already use every day.
At first glance, it is easy to assume they are two sides of the same coin. The digital euro will reuse technical standards we know well, including Berlin Group API patterns and ISO 20022 messaging formats.
Reusing technical standards does not make the digital euro just another open banking rail. Payload formats may look familiar, but the underlying rules are completely separate. Assessing rights, identity verification, consent, liability, and settlement operate under entirely different frameworks.
The digital euro itself is not seen as an opportunity. The opportunity is there though – streamlining managing user permissions and consent across these separate rails.
The regulatory landscape
Financial institutions and fintechs must navigate several distinct European rules:
- PSD3 / PSR: Sets higher standards for API performance, clarifies fraud liability rules, and refines payment initiation.
- Instant Payments Regulation: Obliges payment service providers to offer instant euro credit transfers and mandatory Verification of Payee (VoP).
- FIDA: Intends to expand data access into broader areas such as investments, pensions, and insurance. The proposal is currently stalled in Brussels.
- EUDI Wallet / eIDAS 2.0: Rolls out a standardised European Digital Identity wallet for citizen authentication across member states.
- The digital euro: A sovereign central bank money infrastructure which exists alongside commercial bank deposits.
Even where these initiatives share data formats, their commercial incentives, access rules, and supervisory regimes differ fundamentally.
Permission and consent management
In traditional banking, identification, consent, and settlement took place in one bank portal. Under the upcoming European rules, these steps happen in separate systems.
Consider a single transaction journey:
- A customer authenticates who they are using an EUDI Wallet.
- They grant permission to share bank account details under PSD3.
- They authorise a transaction in central bank money over the digital euro rail.
Each framework has its own legal basis, expiration rules, and liability requirements. Managing these separately creates high friction for customers and heavy technical overhead for developers.
The challenge grows as autonomous systems enter the market. Agentic payments were a major topic at the conference in Paris. Here, software agents execute transactions autonomously on behalf of users or businesses. When an AI agent initiates payments, managing delegation, consent lifetimes, and spending mandates becomes far more demanding. The agent requires clear parameters: what it can buy, up to what threshold, over what timeframe, and on which rail.
The focus should be solving this permission layer. By managing consent lifetimes, revocations, and audit trails under a unified API, multi-rail journeys can work cleanly for end users while staying compliant.
Raising expectations beyond connectivity
In early open banking, provider value was straightforward: building connections to hundreds of individual bank APIs.
Today, Qwist provides reliable account connectivity, data enrichment, and payment initiation across Europe. That connectivity is the foundation. As standardised APIs mature across the continent, client expectations naturally shift to what happens after the connection is live.
Clients need intelligent workflows, unified data schemas, and reliable error handling. We are building towards being the regulated layer that simplifies these steps. We handle consent handoffs, changing specifications, and rule differences across rails so clients do not have to rebuild their systems for every new mandate.
Practical business use cases
Consumer wallets get the headlines, but the immediate practical use cases sit in B2B and enterprise workflows.
Businesses will not hold digital euro directly. Corporate holding limits are set to zero, meaning any incoming digital euro balances sweep immediately into commercial bank accounts via an automatic waterfall mechanism. The real value is in payment acceptance and accounting:
- Payment acceptance: Merchants gain an additional secure checkout method with instant settlement certainty and lower processing costs.
- Unified reconciliation: Automatic matching of incoming payments across regular SEPA, instant credit transfers, and digital euro sweeps into a single reporting feed.
- Smart routing: Directing transactions to the best path based on processing cost, execution speed, and customer preference.
- Credit decisions: Combining verified account data with wider financial records to speed up commercial lending reviews.
Focusing on these enterprise flows builds on what fintechs such as Qwist do best, without competing in the crowded consumer wallet space.
Designing for multi-rail payments
We are not launching a standalone digital euro product today. Open questions remain on third-party access to the sovereign rail. If third-party providers gain direct access, the possibilities are broad. If access remains limited to banks, the workflow routes through banking partners.
Instead of building speculative products, we design our platform to be rail independent. Our consent engine, data pipelines, and payment logic treat the digital euro as one rail among several. When new rails or regulatory mandates arrive, the core integration remains stable. Our job is to make these systems work together seamlessly, and we’re starting now.
Glenn Mac Donald, Qwist CEO
Glenn Mac Donald is Managing Director and Group CEO of Qwist GmbH, a BaFin and ZAG-licensed Open Finance infrastructure provider connecting more than 3,600 banking institutions across Europe. He leads Qwist’s strategy and growth as the company expands its Connect, Assess and Activate platform, delivering solutions for regulated data access, financial intelligence, Pay by Bank and Account Verification. Glenn brings over 20 years of C-level, board, and regulatory leadership experience across payments and RegTech. He previously served as SVP Global Cards Acquiring at Adyen, CEO of Nasdaq-listed RegTech firm ZignSec (leading its sale to G2RS Group), Chief Commercial Officer and Board Member at International Card Services (ICS, part of ABN AMRO), and Non-Executive Chair at payabl., with earlier senior roles at Visa Europe, ING Group, and Deloitte.
