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Stablecoin issuer Paxos will gain access to the European Union (EU), by agreeing to buy Finland-based electronic money institution (EMI) Membrane Finance. "The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval [but] upon completion of the acquisition, Paxos will be a fully licensed EMI in Finland and the EU." Membrane's digital assets are regulated by Finland's Fin-FSA and fully compliant with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). This follows Tether's recent investment in Quantoz Payments to support the latter's launch of its EURQ and USDQ MiCA-compliant stablecoins. In July 2024, USDC and EURC issuer Circle claimed that it became MiCA compliant when it attained an EMI license from the French Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR). https://paxos.com/blog/paxos-to-acquire-finnish-e-money-institution-membrane-finance/

As Stephen King said "sooner or later, everything old is new again!" In the 1990s Finland experimented with central bank digital currency in the form of its Avant stored-value card. It was never very popular and was discontinued in 2006.

Finland-based Membrane Finance has released a fully-reserved stablecoin backed by the euro. The company is licensed by the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority (Fin-FSA) and claims that the new "EUROe" coin is "the first and only ... crypto stablecoin.regulated by an EU-based financial authority.

This article analyzes the current central bank digital currency (CBDC) landscape. A sample of potential candidate countries for establishing a CBDC was selected, motives for implementing a CBDC were collected, and variables were assigned to these motives. Statistical methods were applied to obtain a sample of the countries with the highest correlation with three CBDC "pioneer" countries (Bahamas, China, and Uruguay). The results show that the Baltic Sea area (Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland) is a good CBDC candidate, in South America it's Brazil, and in Asia, China and Malaysia show high correlations with the three pioneer countries. In Africa, South Africa stands out as an optimal area for CBDC implementation.

The Avant smart card system created by the Bank of Finland in the 1990's can be considered the world's first CBDC and the only one so far that has gone into production. Avant cards were based on smart card technology similar to that used in debit and credit cards today. Even though the system was initiated, developed, and for the first few years operated by the central bank, it was eventually spun off and sold to commercial banks. Once debit cards became less expensive and were upgraded to use smart card technology, Avant became obsolete and was shut down.

Even if these problems for the various forms of programmable money can be overcome, it still leaves the question of what is programmable money for? Robert Sams points to the general potential for innovation, "More likely are the use-cases that don't even exist today and can't exist without programmable money. Use-cases where the contractual form of the deal is changed due to the capabilities of programmable money." Aleksi Grym (head of digitalisation at the Bank of Finland) has a less optimistic view. "Generally, I'm not a fan of new words for old concepts, so in this case I'm asking myself, what would a normal person call 'programmable money'? I think the answer is 'conditional payment'."

After Visa and Mastercard gave it the boot, PornHub is now accepting only crypto only for its premium service in most countries. In at least some EU countries, for instance Amsterdam, Germany, Finland, users appear to be able to use Lastschrift (direct bank debit) or SEPA (the euro zone the bank transfer system). Pornhub's five largest traffic sources come from the U.S. with 23.76%, followed by Japan, Germany, France, and the U.K. So does that make Bitcoin a medium of exchange, at least in the U.S.?

"Governments should consider an international moratorium on the development of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) due to the financial stability risk they could pose for small jurisdictions, the former director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen Cecchetti, told central bankers in Finland on Thursday."

According to a BearingPoint survey across seven European countries, cash is the most used payment method overall with contactless debit cards second. Cash use is significantly higher in Austria (79%) and Germany (71%), but respondents from Switzerland (63%), Ireland (61%), the Netherlands (57%), and France (55%) also show a relatively high level of cash use. Finland has a significantly lower frequency of cash usage at 43%.

The Digital Identity Working Group (DIWG) has proposed a set of high-level principles to enable future mutual recognition and interoperability of digital identities. The members of the DIWG are from Australia, Canada, Finland, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. This is the group's first set of publicly released work since its 2020 inception.

Euroclear has invested in Fnality, the blockchain payments consortium formerly known as the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) and owned by 16 major financial institutions. Euroclear operates Central Securities Depositories (CSDs) across Europe, including Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In October, Fnality plans to launch its first payment currency with pounds sterling deposited at the Bank of England. That makes it a so-called wholesale synthetic CBDC where the purpose is for institutions to use it for settlement, especially for blockchain-based transactions.

The future of P27 Nordic Payments (P27), which launched in 2019 with the aim of delievering fast, cross-border, multi-currency account to account payments across the Nordic region, is uncertain, after it withdrew its clearing licence application from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. P27 is owned by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Nordea, OP Financial Group, SEB and Swedbank. P27 CEO Paula da Silva said that "it is evident that our vision was too ambitious and complex... [and] we need to reassess our future ambition in the Nordic payments market."