Today, Iberpay and most Spanish banks shared plans to simulate digital payments in euros during this year’s proof of concept tests. The 29 banks, including BBVA, Sabadell, Santander, ING and Deutsche Bank, are joined by payment service organizations Iberpay, Bizum and Redsys.

The group acknowledges that this relates to a possible issuance of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), as the Eurosystem’s CBDC investigation will only end in October 2023. The decision on whether to issue a digital euro will only be taken after that.

Spanish banks want to test how a retail CBDC would fit into current payment infrastructures, including banks, processors and other offerings such as local instant payment system Bizum.

As previously reported, the European Central Bank (ECB) has shared its work priorities, which include person-to-person (p2P) transfers, in-store payments and e-commerce payments. The tests will involve banks as intermediaries and custodians of CBDC accounts.

The full list of participating banks is below, but it appears to omit Spain’s third largest bank, CaixaBank. The banks are: BBVA, Banco Sabadell, Banco Santander, Abanca, Arquia, Banca March, Banca Pueyo, Banco Caminos, Banco Mediolanum, Bankinter, Caixa Guissona, Caixa Ontinyent, Caja de Ingenieros, Cajalmendralejo, Cecabank, Deutsche Bank, Eurocaja Rural, EVO Bank, Caja Rural Group, Cajamar Group, Ibercaja, ING, Kutxabank, Laboral Kutxa, N26, Openbank, Orange Bank, Targobank and Unicaja Banco.

Iberpay has already led several trials related to tokenized payments and programmable or smart money. As part of its smart money experiments, it previously tested a potential token-based carrier CBDC and account-based digital currency using the Iberpay Red-i interbank blockchain network.

The results of the latest experiments will be shared in 2023.

Meanwhile, the ECB is seeking payments industry experts to propose use cases for programmable money for a retail digital euro.