This week the European Central Bank (ECB) released a report on the lessons learnt from its prototyping exercise for the digital euro, and Amazon was fortunate to participate. Our aim in the exercise was to successfully deliver a front-end prototype of an ecommerce transaction and integrate it with the Eurosystem’s back-end infrastructure prototype, thus confirming that a potential digital euro could be smoothly integrated into the existing European payments landscape.
The prototyping exercise ran from July 2022 to February 2023. Although all developed protypes will be discarded in future phases, it is an important part of the investigation phase of the digital euro project, which was launched by the ECB and the euro area national central banks to ensure that central bank money remains accessible in the digital age.
At Amazon we were proud to have been part of this exercise, during which we were able to offer the ECB our expertise from an ecommerce payments perspective. We are invested in enabling modern, fast, and inexpensive payments for our customers, and we believe our customer obsession lends itself to maximising convenience, speed, and security. Our involvement in the project further illustrates our commitment to Europe, where we directly employ more than 200,000 people across the continent, support 225,000 European small and medium enterprises through our stores, and have spent €142 billion to grow Amazon across the EU since 2010.
We appreciate the ECB’s diligence in working with various stakeholders to ensure a digital euro works in practice, and we are optimistic that the new public infrastructure will deliver significant benefits to EU residents, merchants, and the broader EU economy.
