The European debate on the digital euro often focuses on technology choices, privacy guarantees, and legislative timelines. A new report from Ortec Finance and NextWealth suggests the harder challenge lies elsewhere: how to scale financial innovation without sacrificing trust, explainability, and regulatory control. That lesson matters directly for the digital euro as it moves from concept to implementation.
The report, Innovation with Integrity, examines how UK wealth and advice firms are struggling to modernise their systems under tighter consumer protection rules. While the context is retail financial advice, the underlying problem mirrors the digital euro debate. How do institutions introduce automation, data-driven decision-making, and even AI, while ensuring outcomes remain understandable, auditable, and defensible?
For the digital euro, this question goes to the heart of public acceptance.
Why integrity beats speed
Across interviews with senior industry leaders, the report identifies a growing tension between innovation and control. Firms are encouraged to experiment, yet cannot afford failures that undermine client trust, particularly when dealing with retirement savings and long-term outcomes.
This is strikingly similar to the Eurosystem’s position. The European Central Bank is under pressure to deliver a modern, resilient digital payment instrument, but without introducing opaque mechanisms that citizens, regulators, or courts cannot scrutinise.
The report’s core argument is that innovation must be built “inside the controls”, not layered on top of them. That principle aligns closely with how the ECB has framed the digital euro as digital cash, not a disruptive fintech product.
Explainability as a design constraint
One of the report’s strongest themes is its rejection of black-box automation. While firms see clear value in AI for reducing administrative burdens, interviewees consistently warn that opaque models break the evidentiary chain required by regulation.
This has direct relevance for the digital euro. Any future use of algorithmic decision-making, whether in transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, or offline risk controls, will face similar scrutiny. If citizens cannot understand why a payment was flagged, delayed, or rejected, trust erodes quickly.
The report argues for what it calls “glass-box AI”: automation that shows its workings, sources, assumptions, and changes over time. For a public digital currency, this principle may be even more critical than in private financial advice. Public money demands public accountability.
Continuous monitoring, not one-off assurance
Another parallel lies in the report’s emphasis on ongoing outcomes monitoring. In financial advice, annual reviews are no longer sufficient under consumer protection rules. Firms are expected to monitor risks continuously and intervene early.
The digital euro faces a comparable expectation. Safeguards around financial stability, misuse, and consumer protection cannot rely on static design choices alone. They require continuous oversight, transparent triggers, and clearly defined responses.
This supports the ECB’s gradual, cautious approach. Rather than launching a feature-rich system from day one, the digital euro is being designed with limits, controls, and the ability to adjust parameters over time.
Data architecture matters more than features
Perhaps the most transferable insight from the report is its focus on data foundations. The authors argue that innovation collapses without a well-defined, shared data model. Fragmented systems create operational risk, weak monitoring, and compliance failures.
For the digital euro, this reinforces why interoperability, standardisation, and clear data boundaries are not secondary technical details. They are prerequisites for scaling safely across the euro area, integrating with banks and payment providers, and maintaining consistent user protections.
Implications for Europe’s digital money project
Innovation with Integrity ultimately makes a case for restraint. Faster is not always better, and sophistication without explainability can be counterproductive. For the digital euro, this suggests that success will depend less on cutting-edge features and more on disciplined system design.
As the legislative process continues and technical work advances, the digital euro may benefit from the same mindset the report advocates for financial advice: move faster where possible, add guardrails where necessary, and never lose sight of trust as the core asset.
In that sense, innovation with integrity is not just a slogan for the wealth industry. It may be a useful guiding principle for Europe’s next form of public money.