Financial Sovereignty: Seizing the Shift to Tokenization

“Based on the success of the euro, let us now build Europe’s economic and financial sovereignty.” This was the message delivered by François Villeroy de Galhau, then Governor of the Bank of France, at the Aix-en-Provence Economic Meetings in 2025. It is a message also long championed by the French Association of Corporate Treasurers (AFTE) and its more than 1,700 members, who are aware of the importance of not depending on non-European actors in a sector as strategic as finance. The sudden decision by the United States on June 12 to ban non-Americans from accessing Anthropic’s most advanced AI models served to remind us that this awakening can no longer be delayed.

Multiple initiatives undertaken

It must be acknowledged that, since the speech delivered nearly a year ago by François Villeroy de Galhau, things have started to shift. First, the acceleration of the deployment by banks of the new pan-European digital wallet Wero helps provide merchants with an alternative card acceptance method (via instant transfers) that is potentially both less costly and more sovereign. Indeed, while France has a well-established domestic card network with CB, the European Central Bank (ECB) noted in a report published last year that 13 Eurozone countries were “entirely dependent on international card networks,” which accounted for 61% of card payments in the Eurozone in 2022.

Building on the latest technological innovations, including distributed ledger technology (DLT) – of which blockchain is the most well-known form – and tokenization (the act of issuing or representing an asset in the form of a token on a distributed ledger), public and monetary authorities in the old continent are simultaneously multiplying initiatives: implementation of the European MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets) regulation, which specifically regulates transactions involving stable tokens (stablecoins); project for the creation of a retail digital euro by the European Central Bank; development by the Eurosystem of a DLT technology intended to allow settlement in central bank money of transactions on the blockchain, with the short-term Pontes projects and the longer-term Appia projects; the establishment in France of a strategic group focused on innovation and on the tokenization of finance… Co-chaired by the Banque de France, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), and the Directorate General of the Treasury, this working group, in which the AFTE actively participates, supports, for example, the Banque de France in the implementation of the ‘Pythagore’ project, dedicated to the tokenization of the short-term negotiable debt securities market (NEU CP).

Relevant use cases for businesses

For AFTE, this dual aspiration for regained financial sovereignty and the emergence of continental market infrastructures at the forefront of innovation must be considered within a broader economic perspective. The priority, in our view, is to ensure access to financial services that are essential for the sustainability and growth of businesses, as well as the competitiveness of these services. Several use cases arising from the tokenization of financial instruments and payments have already been identified by treasurers. For example, the ability to make real-time, lower-cost cross-border payments through the use of stablecoins, and the possibility of investing cash surpluses in tokenized funds at any time of the day, without any longer being constrained by cut-off times (the deadline for requesting a bank to execute a transaction). In fact, several conditions will nevertheless need to be met for companies to adopt these changes on a large scale.

A necessary interoperability

In the face of the proliferation of projects, both public and private, the first pitfall to avoid is that of excessive fragmentation, which would prevent the emergence of a credible alternative to the dominant extra-European players. This is why the response should not be at the French level but at the community level, and must involve intelligent cooperation between private actors – banks or fintechs – and public ones – in particular the ECB.

Another key issue is that future on-chain market infrastructures will need to be interoperable with each other, as well as with existing financial infrastructures, to ensure flawless end-to-end execution of operations. Another example of necessary interoperability: banks could develop ‘deposit tokens’ as an alternative to stablecoins, but only if these tokens can move freely from one bank to another.

While dollar stablecoins currently make up about 99% of the global market, developing euro stablecoins is also crucial to maintain, or even boost, the euro’s role in international transactions and, in turn, reduce European companies’ exposure to dollar exchange rate risk. The road ahead may be winding, but the path to follow is already clear.

An article published as part of the AFTE’s participation in the Rencontres Économiques d’Aix-en-Provence 2026.

Press contact: Olivier Coppermann – olivier.coppermann@seitosei-actifin.com
+33 6 07 25 04 48