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\\ \\ Piero Cipollone\\ \\ Member of the ECB's Executive Board

Speech by Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the Deutsche Bundesbank’s Symposium on “Future of payments: trends and innovations in Germany and Europe”\ [1\] I would like to thank Jean-Francois Jamet for his help in preparing this speech, as well as Thomas Vlassopoulos and Alessandro Speciale for their comments.

Two years ago, at this very same Symposium, I argued that Europe had a unique opportunity.\ [2\]

Cipollone, P. (2024), “ Towards a digital capital markets union”, keynote speech at the Bundesbank Symposium on the Future of Payments, Frankfurt am Main, 7 October.

Tokenisation and distributed ledger technology, or DLT, were beginning to reshape financial markets. By representing and transferring assets in the form of programmable data files – tokens – they offered the prospect of making finance more efficient, enabling it to operate around the clock with greater automation and fewer intermediaries.

At the heart of this transformation lies a Copernican revolution. Tokenised assets will be at the centre of a new digital finance ecosystem that allows issuers, investors and intermediaries to think anew and innovate.

But this transformation also poses a risk: a proliferation of incompatible platforms could reproduce, or even deepen, the current fragmentation of Europe’s capital markets.

I therefore outlined a vision for building an integrated and dynamic European ecosystem for digital assets from the outset, with central bank money at its core. Since then, we have moved from vision to delivery. And today, I will discuss the next steps in turning that vision into reality.

I will first recall the objectives we set ourselves and why they remain our cardinal points. I will then explain the progress we have made, in particular through our Pontes and Appia projects. Finally, I will outline the conditions for success, namely what it will take to turn technological change into a genuine transformation of finance in Europe.

The vision: an integrated European market for digital assets

The promise of tokenisation is not simply that existing processes will become faster, but that it will enable us to simplify the architecture of finance itself.

This is particularly relevant in Europe, where capital markets remain deeply fragmented despite some recent progress towards integration.\ [3\]

ECB (2026), Financial integration and structure in the euro area, 7 May, and Lagarde, C. (2024), “ Follow the money: channelling savings into investment and innovation in Europe”, speech at the 34th European Banking Congress: “Out of the Comfort Zone: Europe and the New World Order”, Frankfurt am Main, 22 November.

The EU now has 31 central securities depositories (CSDs), 14 central counterparties (CCPs) and 323 trading venues.\ [4\]

European Securities and Markets Authority (2025), ESMA statistics on securities and markets, 12 December.

And while some larger groups cover the value chain – encompassing trading, clearing, settlement and asset servicing – cross-border settlement remains limited. Securities are still predominantly held and settled within local CSDs. Even in CSDs belonging to the same group, most transactions are settled within individual CSDs in the group, with limited cross-border transactions. In 2023 more than 95% of transactions in both volume and value terms were settled between parties in the same individual CSD.\ [5\]

Hanssens, B., Sandín de Vega, D. and Sowa, H.F. (2025), “ Advancing the capital markets union in Europe: a roadmap for harmonising securities post-trading”, Economic Bulletin, Issue 4, ECB.

So how can tokenisation help simplify our financial ecosystem and make it more efficient?