The European Central Bank (ECB) announced, on Wednesday 3 January, that it had launched five calls for tender relating to the digital euro project, in order to establish framework agreements with potential suppliers of certain digital euro components and related services.
The calls concern the Alias Lookup component to simplify payments and avoid having to use long account numbers, the Risk and Fraud Management component and the App and Software Development Kit (SDK) components.
The ECB will also launch procedures to select a potential supplier for the Offline solution component and for the component enabling the secure exchange of payment information.
Other elements, such as payment settlement, would be provided internally by the Eurosystem.
The monetary institute indicates that it is not committed to launching any of the development work listed in the calls. This selection procedure is simply intended to ensure that the Eurosystem is ready to begin developing a digital euro if the decision to issue such a currency is adopted by the ECB Governing Council in the future.
The ECB reiterates that no decision to issue a digital euro will be taken until the legislative process, aimed at providing a potential digital euro with a legislative framework (see EUROPE 13211/11), conducted in parallel by the co-legislators, has been completed.
Link to the five calls for applications: https://aeur.eu/f/a9w (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)