ECB’s Cipollone warns digital euro could be delayed if talks drag on

The signal here is procedural, not technical: a sitting ECB board member is publicly linking the digital euro's timeline to the pace of consultations, which puts the leverage over scheduling partly in the hands of the parties being consulted rather than the central bank alone. That matters for the banks, payment providers and intermediaries whose business models a retail CBDC would touch, since they now have a clearer sense of where the pressure points sit. Whether the warning actually accelerates deliberations or simply shifts blame for any slippage is the open question worth watching.