In April 2022, the European Central Bank launched a call for payment service providers, banks and technology companies to engage in the creation of prototypes for a digital euro and associated payment services.
Fifty-four companies applied to be part of the project, and in September the ECB chose five to work with. These included payments company Worldline, banking consortium EPI, payments technology company Nexi and Amazon. Joining them was just one bank – CaixaBank. It wins the award as western Europe’s best digital bank this year.
Spain is one of the most digitalized countries in this region, standing comparison with Sweden. The country’s banking system has been particularly successful in onboarding a good percentage of the population onto Bizum, a national peer-to-peer payments system launched in 2016 jointly by the country’s banks to enable all their customers to make immediate payments to each other from their mobile phones.
In Spain, CaixaBank is a digital leader among the banks.