On 1 October 2026 the Riksbank announced that the Eurosystem has approved its onboarding to EUREP, the Eurosystem’s repo facility for central banks outside the euro area. The line lets the Riksbank borrow up to EUR 50 billion by pledging eligible euro-denominated collateral, and the ECB has said that drawings under the enhanced facility are…
On 24 September 2026 the ECB announced that its Governing Council had approved a feasibility assessment for TIPS Pix interlinking: a possible connection between the Eurosystem’s TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) platform and Pix, the fast payment system owned and operated by the Central Bank of Brazil. The two central banks will work through technical,…
The European Central Bank has been the sole gatekeeper for banking licences across the euro area since 4 November 2014, and in September 2026 it rewrote the manual for getting one. The revised Guide to licence applications, which replaces the 2019 edition, sets out how ECB banking authorisation works: who has to apply, how a…
On 6 January 2026 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published a newsletter on the implementation of the Principles for effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting, the 2013 standard known as BCBS 239. For anyone running a BCBS 239 risk data aggregation and risk reporting programme, it sets no new template and no fresh…
On 2 September 2026, ECB Supervisory Board Chair Claudia Buch used a Bruegel Annual Meetings panel in Brussels to put numbers on the supervisory reform that has been building through the year. For teams inside ECB-supervised banks, three of those numbers land directly on the reporting function: the ECB has agreed to cut the supervisory…
On 27 May 2026 the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance published the findings report for Project Agora, and the headline was concrete. A prototype had settled wholesale cross-border payments across several currencies using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits, and the project’s legal analysis found that settlement…
On 28 August 2026 the ECB confirmed that the Eurosystem is reassessing the timeline for the November 2026 TARGET Services release. TARGET Services comprise T2 for settling payments, T2S for settling securities, TIPS for settling instant payments and the ECMS for collateral management, so release-calendar changes can affect participants across several Eurosystem market infrastructures. The…
The ECB IT Risk Questionnaire (ITRQ) is where a significant institution puts a number on its own ICT risk before its Joint Supervisory Team does. Every bank under direct ECB supervision completes the workbook once a year, scoring its inherent ICT risk and the maturity of the controls that mitigate it. The 2026 questionnaire covers…
On 19 August 2026 the Eurosystem named 61 financial market stakeholders and public sector institutions to the Appia contact group, the standing forum that will now shape how central bank money settles tokenised assets in Europe. The seats were filled from a call for expressions of interest issued on 1 June 2026, and the group…
On 18 August 2026 the European Central Bank asked a narrow slice of the technology industry a very specific question: are the secure-hardware standards behind the offline digital euro mature enough, and does the market support them? The call for expression of interest, published through the ECB’s market infrastructure and payments news channel, gives interested…