A young boy who invests his monthly pocket money in Italian government bonds, buying them in very small amounts. This is one of the use cases tested by Bancomat in collaboration with nine of Italy’s leading banks to develop the euro-pegged stablecoin, Eur.bank. The project, however, is already looking beyond a simple cryptocurrency pegged to the single currency: the ambition is to build a system-wide platform capable of managing the various forms the euro may take in the coming years.
The aim is to enable banks to offer, via a single infrastructure, the traditional euro, the ECB’s future digital euro and Eur.bank’s blockchain-based euro – expected by the end of the year – thereby allowing individuals and businesses to choose the most suitable option in each case, in a simple and transparent manner.
“Bancomat’s role,” explains CEO Fabrizio Burlando, “is to provide the technological and regulatory infrastructure – a network that enables partner banks to issue and offer services based on interoperable stablecoins, rather than competing on their own with their own stablecoin. The network model – thanks in part to a service provided on an ‘as-a-service’ basis to enable even the smallest banks to adopt these tools – is designed to create an ecosystem with significant transaction volumes. Our aim is for it to become a European standard.”
The EuroPA alliance, of which Bancomat is a member, also forms part of this vision, with the aim of expanding the European payments network in whatever form the single currency may take. However, at least in the initial phase, the strategy remains focused on the Italian market and its approximately twenty million potential users, who could thus gain access to what Burlando describes as a sort of ‘internet of money’: a global public network, always operational, optimised to transfer value efficiently, securely and at low cost. “The most immediate use case relates to simplifying cross-border payments, overcoming the complexities of international bank transfers, for which we are already seeing significant demand, particularly in the B2B sector amongst large corporations,” confirms Burlando.
The first area of development therefore appears to be that of international business-to-business payments, promising faster processing times, greater traceability and lower costs. But the underlying logic is broader. The same infrastructure also makes it possible to simplify the trading of tokenised financial instruments, such as government bonds, making them available for purchase at any time and even in very small amounts. Looking ahead, the potential extends to credit: “We see great potential for these instruments in lending too, where the technology allows digital assets to be used as collateral that can be transferred instantly and automatically, eliminating counterparty risk and reducing costs.”