.svg)
EU lawmakers have expressed concerns about Amazon’s role in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) digital euro investigation, citing issues such as governance and data protection.
“The Parliament has been a great supporter of this project,” said Eero Heinäluoma, a member of the European Parliament who sits on the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON).
MEPs “totally understand” that this is a long-term project and that it requires a lot of preparation, the Finnish MEP said.
Yet, this has done little to calm worries among MEPs about the role of Amazon in the digital euro’s development, he suggested.
Recently, the ECB announced that it will collaborate with five companies, which range from bigtech to EU banking institutions, to develop potential user interfaces for the digital euro as the project veers forward.
Amazon, specifically, will be testing a digital euro prototype in the e-commerce field.
“There are some concerns about the selection of Amazon out of the companies to help develop a user interface for the central bank digital currency. We know the reputation of Amazon in terms of social and tax policy. It’s questionable, I have to say,” Heinäluoma said.
Amazon has got the highest fines as a result of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) so far for violating the rules and misusing private data, he pointed out.
“What has Amazon got that cannot be found in the European Union? ... does this fit into the idea of EU strategic autonomy?” the centre-left MEP asked Fabio Panetta, a member of the ECB's executive board, who was speaking at the parliamentary session.
Heinäluoma was not alone in being unimpressed by the involvement of Amazon. He was joined by his colleague Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, a French MEP.
“You are already answering questions that will have us wondering how you will manage the strategic autonomy of Europe,” she said.
“When you’re saying that Amazon is not being paid any money,” acknowledging Panetta’s previous comments on the subject, “it could be even worse as Amazon wants to be paid with data.”
Yon-Courtin, who represents Emmanuel Macron’s Republique En Marche! Part, pondered how it can be justified that “an American company has been selected to develop a tool that is supposed to help the EU achieve its strategic autonomy”.
Touching upon the data protection theme that has been a constant for the European Parliament during the development of the digital euro, the former lawyer outlined that, unlike coins and notes, a digital euro will not have such privacy.
“Since the issue that one of the biggest data eaters in the world, Amazon, has been selected to cooperate in the e-commerce side, I’m wondering which devices and techniques if any have already been set up with Amazon to safeguard personal data, prevent massive data collection and sharing, and prevent Amazon buying all of the data in Europe?”
Fellow ECON member Ernest Urtasun also indicated his frustration at Amazon being used, drawing parallels with Meta’s Diem project (then Libra), which was one of the motivations for the digital euro in the first place.
“There was a strong opposition that an American company was creating a currency that was going to be used by us. We wanted this to remain in sovereign hands.”
Urtasun, who sits with the European Parliament’s left-wing green faction, complained that “now seeing Amazon in the middle of this exercise is something difficult to understand”.
“Not because this is an American company, this is not a protectionist issue, but because it has a record fine for violating data protection in the EU,” he said.
Panetta defended the decision to use Amazon, stating that it was involved in the prototyping part of the digital euro investigation — something that the ECB will have completed by the end of the first quarter next year.
“This is an exercise to understand how to use the digital euro in the future,” said Panetta. “The prototyping work is a learning activity that will have the ECB test technical options for a digital euro.”
On the matter of why Amazon was chosen, Panetta said that, during the selection process, the company had reached the data privacy standards expected of applicants to be involved in the ECB’s work and “matched best the specificities required for specific use cases”.
Panetta further underlined that the other four companies involved — CaixaBank, the European Payments Initiative, Worldline and Nexi — are European. “This shows sufficient capabilities in the euro area.”
However, Heinäluoma probed Panetta on whether the ECB had “taken into account” Amazon’s social and tax policies, as well as data protection violations, asking whether this was a form of criteria for the decision.
Panetta, while continuing to insist that Amazon is not being paid any money to support the project, said the ECB only asked companies to explain how they operate with other payment schemes and are interoperable.
“We want to learn from this, and then we will do all of our analysis to develop the actual interfaces and actual capabilities. So, we did not explore all other functions and all other aspects of their activity,” he explained. “We concentrated on payments and how they operate.”
Panetta’s questioning from MEPs came at the same time as new updates were given on the ECB’s progress.
It was confirmed that a number of steps will need to be taken before a digital euro can be introduced, including analysis of how financial intermediaries provide front-end services, how the currency would be distributed to users and how payments would be settled.
EU citizens are unlikely to have the option to use a digital euro until 2026 at the earliest, which should align well with planned legislative proposals from the European Commission that are due next year.
