On 1 April 2026, Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) responsible for the digital euro project, will be visiting Latvia. Meetings are scheduled with the central bank and the financial community to discuss the digital euro project and other key issues.
During his visit, Mr Cipollone will deliver an open lecture as part of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (SSE Riga) "Geopolitics Unscripted" series. The topic is: "The Digital Euro in a Fragmenting World: Ensuring Europe's Resilience and Autonomy in Payments". The lecture:
- will be open for in-person attendance (with prior registration on the SSE Riga website; limited seating) and
- will also be available via livestream (the YouTube channel and Facebook page of Latvijas Banka).
The event will feature opening remarks from Kata Fredheim, Vice President of SSE Riga, and the Governor of Latvijas Banka, Mārtiņš Kazāks. It will be followed by a Q&A session.
The open lecture by Piero Cipollone will take place on 1 April, 12:30–13:30, at SSE Riga, Strēlnieku iela 4a.
The European Central Bank and national central banks of the euro area are working on a digital euro to complement cash as our lives increasingly go digital. The digital euro would offer a European digital payment solution built on European infrastructure. It would allow Europeans to pay throughout the euro area, wherever digital payments are accepted, online and offline, while respecting the highest privacy standards.
The digital euro would not only increase convenience for users, lower fees for merchants, and allow European private payment solutions to scale up more easily. In a world where dependencies can be weaponised, it would also support Europe's resilience and autonomy in payments, which are crucial for the smooth functioning of the economy. General background information on the digital euro project can be sourced from the ECB website.
Piero Cipollone has been a member of the Executive Board of the ECB since 1 November 2023. He is responsible for international and European relations, market infrastructure and payments, and banknotes. He chairs the Eurosystem (formed by the ECB and the national central banks of the euro area) High-Level Task Force on the Digital Euro, the Euro Retail Payments Board, and the Euro Cyber Resilience Board for pan-European Financial Infrastructures.
Before joining the ECB, Mr Cipollone was Deputy Governor of Banca d'Italia. Mr Cipollone graduated with honours in economics from the Sapienza University of Rome. He holds a Master of Arts in Economics from Stanford University and was a visiting scholar at the Economics Department of the University of California, Berkeley.