Today was the first meeting of the Eurogroup for the new year. We started with a strategic discussion on the euro area’s key economic policy priorities for the year ahead. The Commission provided its take on where our focus should be across the coming five years, and ministers engaged in a broad exchange of views covering such issues as competitiveness, fiscal policy and global development.
Our discussion today will feed into the coordination work of the Eurogroup that will begin with the preparation of our next work programme, which will be on the agenda of our next meeting. Everyone around the table is keenly aware of the historical juncture that we are at, but we also made clear to each other that our work will continue, and we must play to our own strengths in deepening the foundations of the euro and increasing our coordination and collaboration with each other.
Our focus today was on creating the conditions for stronger economic growth, for resilience in the euro area and for the particular decisions that need to be made in 2025, in order to strengthen the euro.
We then moved on to a discussion on innovation in wholesale payments. We looked at the available options for modernising the settlement of wholesale transactions in central bank money. We looked at the market needs, which are evolving very quickly in response to technology which is changing at a fast pace through solutions such as distributed ledger technology and tokenisation.
The ECB shared with us some encouraging results underway from the exploratory work that they are leading regarding the use of new technologies such as distributed ledger technologies for their role in the settlement of central bank money undertaken in collaboration with the private sector. We all noted that these technologies have the potential to enhance the speed, efficiency and transparency of financial markets, reducing barriers to entry, and ultimately may even serve as a driver of capital market integration in Europe.
We then moved from the wholesale end of the spectrum to retail with the digital euro. Since our last discussion on the topic, the ECB has continued work on technical preparations. The deliberations and the discussions of the co-legislators – the Council and the European Parliament – are also advancing on a proposed legal framework. We acknowledged again that payments behaviour is quickly changing and that the decline in the use of cash is continuing. An array of different mobile payments solutions are now gaining momentum. In the absence of a digital euro, consumer adoption of international payment methods continues to rise. The longer we stay on the sidelines, the harder it will be for us to catch up.
The changing political context, and the big ambitions the major players in the tech world have, underscore what is at stake. These issues are coming into an increasingly sharp focus for ministers around the table of the Eurogroup. And that’s why we continue to take stock of this project.
I was delighted to welcome the finance ministers of France and Lithuania, who gave us an update on the economic priorities of their governments.