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There were a total of 54 applicants that sought to help the ECB with its endeavor, and the bank settled on Amazon, the European Payments Initiative , Spanish multinational CaixaBank, French payments platform Worldline and Italian payments-focused bank Nexi. Amazon has been tasked with developing e-commerce payments within the project. CaixaBank will be in charge of developing online peer-to-peer payments for a mobile application, while Worldline is responsible for the offline version. The EPI will manage point of sale payments from the payer while Nexi will handle them for the payee.
This development comes amid a two-year investigation by the ECB into whether it should issue a digital euro that would be a central bank-issued alternative to cash. It is expected to finish the current phase of its investigation and evaluate the prototypes produced by March 2023.