Bank of Italy Official Proposes Tokenized SEPA Extension

A senior Bank of Italy official called for European policymakers to explore a tokenized extension of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) system during a speech in Rome this week, highlighting its potential to modernize Europe's cashless payments infrastructure while preserving central bank oversight.

Bank of Italy Deputy Governor Chiara Scotti delivered the remarks at the Digital Assets and Monetary Policy Transmission workshop. She described tokenization as increasingly relevant and urged authorities to consider how existing payment arrangements could evolve. "A tokenized extension of SEPA could become an important area for reflection, building on a distinctive European asset: a common payments framework with scale, shared standards and an established degree of interoperability," Scotti said.

SEPA enables uniform cashless euro payments across the European Union and several non-EU countries. European Central Bank data show non-cash payment transactions, including those via SEPA, reached 116 trillion euros in the first half of 2025, up 2.9 percent from the previous year.

Scotti's proposal aligns with broader Eurosystem efforts to integrate distributed ledger technology with...