The cooperative spirit at the heart of the digital euro
Lecture by Mr Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the annual meeting of the Federation of Italian Cooperative Credit Banks (Federcasse), Rome, 17 July 2026.
The speech is about the digital euro and payment systems; it contains no signal on the monetary policy stance.
This speech carries no signal about the monetary policy stance. Its score of zero means "no signal", not "balanced stance", so it is not included in the bank's average score.
Summary
Cipollone describes the common ground between the digital euro and cooperative banking. He recalls that money is the product of a social consensus, that it derives its value from the confidence that it will also be accepted tomorrow, and that this consensus is guaranteed by law. He stresses that the legal tender status of central bank money is the anchor of the monetary system and that trust in other forms of money rests on their convertibility at par into central bank money. Using the example of Italy's first cooperative bank, founded in 1883, he describes how the model based on mutual trust spread. (BIS publishes only the introductory section of this speech.)
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ECB (European Central Bank) · Euro area
Introductory section of the speech
Source: European Central Bank (ECB). © European Central Bank; reproduced with the source acknowledged. The text was extracted automatically from the publisher's PDF or web page; only line breaks were adjusted. Footnotes and tables may have turned into plain text — see the source for the official text.
Long ago, Aristotle himself noted how money played an essential role in society as an instrument that made it possible to establish a relationship between all things and make them commensurate. But money itself is the by-product of a convention, the expression of a social agreement: it holds its value because people trust it will be accepted tomorrow as it is today. And this social agreement is enshrined in law. Without it, money would be just a simple piece of metal, a scrap of paper or a string of code.
That's why Aristotle referred to money as " nomisma ", or the expression of the law (" nomos "). Today, the law grants legal tender status to money issued by the central bank. In other words, it must be accepted at full face value to settle any payment due. This in turn constitutes the anchor for the monetary system: confidence in every other form of money depends on the ability to convert it at par into central bank money.
Trust is also the basis that sustains banking and enables commercial banks to issue money. Every deposit and every loan depends on confidence in the institution behind it. Your cooperative movement was founded on making that confidence mutual.
In 1883 in Loreggia, near Padua, Leone Wollemborg founded the first Italian cooperative bank with 32 members. Farmers already had access to credit, but they were dependent on moneylenders who, faced with zero competition, set terms of interest that were very much in their favour.
Wollemborg's solution to this was to found a bank owned by the borrowers themselves, serving only their own interests. The model spread quickly, and by 1897 there were more than 900 cooperative banks throughout Italy.