ECB board member tells banks: stablecoins are coming for your deposits, not your lunch 🍽️

European Central Bank Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said wider stablecoin adoption could erode commercial banks' retail deposit base, warning that digital payments are already stripping fees and transaction data from lenders. Cipollone made the remarks Friday in a speech to Italy's Federation of Cooperative Credit Banks in Rome, framing the digital euro as the structural counterweight. "The digital euro would both preserve the role of public money and ensure banks remain involved in the payments ecosystem while continuing to meet their customers' needs," Cipollone said.

Cipollone pointed to mobile payments as the opening salvo, noting that they already exceed one in ten point-of-sale transactions in Ireland, the Netherlands and Finland. "When their customers use mobile payments, banks typically pay higher fees than those associated with debit cards and often do not receive any information about the payment, so they lose both fees and data," Cipollone said, adding that stablecoins could accelerate the shift by pulling deposits out of the regulated banking system entirely. The global stablecoin market sits at roughly $300 billion, per DefiLlama data, and is almost entirely dollar-denominated.

Italian cooperative banks have a particular exposure: half of Italy's cooperative bank branches serve towns with fewer than 10,000 people, where the loss of payment data and deposit funding could compress local lending capacity. Cipollone's argument is that the digital euro preserves banks' intermediary role by keeping customer accounts, interchange revenue and transaction data inside the existing system. The ECB has said the digital euro will pay no interest and will include holding limits to discourage large-balance migration.

On Tuesday, the ECB selected 36 payment service providers, including Deutsche Bank, UniCredit and Revolut, for a 12-month digital euro pilot due to begin in the second half of 2027. The project will test how a retail central bank digital currency could operate across the euro area before any issuance decision, which the ECB has said could come as early as 2029. The ECB announcement follows ESMA's recent addition of 14 new CASPs to the MiCA register as licensing activity across the bloc continues to slow.