In an exclusive interview with IMGW.news Editor-in-Chief Ray de Bono, RS2 CEO Radi Abd El Haj discussed the future of the digital euro, payments innovation and Europe’s financial sovereignty.
Potentially the most significant development in the eurozone since the launch of the single currency, the digital euro could reshape payments, liquidity management and Europe’s financial sovereignty. RS2 CEO Radi Abd El Haj explains why success will depend not on technology alone, but on trust, convenience and adoption.
More than two decades after the launch of the euro transformed Europe’s monetary landscape, policymakers are preparing what could become the single currency’s next defining chapter.
For Radi Abd El Haj, Chief Executive Officer of Malta-headquartered global payments technology company RS2, the digital euro represents far more than another electronic means of payment. Properly implemented, he believes it could provide Europe with the payments infrastructure needed to strengthen financial sovereignty, stimulate innovation and modernise the movement of money across the continent.
Yet he is equally clear that technology alone will not determine its success.
“The digital euro is not only a payment instrument,” he says. “The digital euro is an infrastructure.”
That distinction lies at the heart of his vision.
“The digital euro will not replace any existing payment method today. It will coexist with it.”
Rather than replacing existing payment methods, the digital euro is intended to provide a common European infrastructure capable of reducing dependence on international payment schemes and global technology platforms while creating opportunities for banks, fintech companies and payment providers to develop new services.
“The most important thing is it gives Europe sovereignty,” Abd El Haj explains, adding that it will also improve interoperability across today’s fragmented payments landscape while enabling innovation on top of a trusted public infrastructure.
From Malta to the global payments industry
Abd El Haj has spent almost three decades helping build RS2 into one of Europe’s leading payment technology companies.
Originally founded by two former bankers, who used to work at American Express and Chase, the company began by supplying payment software to banks before evolving into a global provider serving clients across Europe, North America, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.
He credits one strategic decision above all others for the company’s long-term success.
After becoming CEO, RS2 shifted from a traditional software licensing model towards transaction-based outsourcing, creating recurring revenue rather than relying on periodic software sales.
Looking back, Abd El Haj believes the decision fundamentally changed the company’s trajectory. The recurring-income model proved considerably more resilient during the Covid-19 pandemic while allowing RS2 to continue expanding internationally. Today the company operates a single global payments platform, enabling clients to access multiple markets through one technology integration rather than separate regional systems.
Those capabilities now place RS2 among the companies helping shape Europe’s next generation of payment infrastructure.
“the digital euro could become the most significant development in the eurozone’s monetary architecture since the introduction of the single currency itself”
Implications for wealth management
Although much public discussion has focused on retail payments, Abd El Haj believes one of the digital euro’s most interesting consequences may emerge within wealth management.
He is careful to distinguish between its direct and indirect effects.
“The impact is really very minimal,” he says of its immediate effect on wealth managers. The digital euro is being designed as a means of payment rather than an investment or savings product, and current proposals include holding limits specifically intended to complement rather than replace commercial banks.
Its indirect implications, however, may prove considerably more important, though these stem less from the retail digital euro itself than from a parallel Eurosystem initiative to settle tokenized financial assets in central bank money.
Today’s investors increasingly expect immediate access to capital. Moving liquidity between portfolios, institutions and jurisdictions can still involve delays, particularly when transactions cross borders or depend on existing banking processes and multi-step reconciliation, even where cash already moves instantly.
“The digital euro is not only a payment instrument. The digital euro is an infrastructure.”
Abd El Haj believes this shift could significantly improve that experience by allowing the asset leg and the cash leg of a transaction to settle against each other in risk-free central bank money, enabling wealth managers and private banks to give clients faster access to funds when investment opportunities arise.
“The digital euro may not become a new asset class,” he says, “the rails underneath the market could change how clients access and move their money.”
For family offices, private banks and institutional investors, that evolution could become increasingly important as expectations for real-time financial services continue to grow.
Winning public trust
If there is one theme Abd El Haj returns to repeatedly, it is that technological capability alone will not determine whether the digital euro succeeds.
Consumer adoption, he argues, cannot simply be legislated into existence.
“They will adopt because it’s convenient, it’s trusted and it’s useful.”
He compares the challenge to the seamless purchasing experience consumers already enjoy on leading e-commerce platforms. Payments have become almost invisible because checkout processes are fast, intuitive and frictionless. The digital euro, he believes, must achieve exactly the same standard if it is to become part of everyday life.
At the same time, he rejects suggestions that the digital euro will replace existing payment methods.
“The digital euro will not replace any existing payment method today,” he says. “It will coexist with it.”
Instead, its role is to strengthen Europe’s payments ecosystem while giving consumers, merchants and financial institutions another trusted option within an increasingly digital economy.
RS2’s role in Europe’s digital future
RS2 is already positioning itself to support the transition.
The company’s subsidiary RS2 Financial Services, a BaFin-regulated entity, is participating in the European Central Bank’s digital euro innovation programme and intends to enable merchants to accept the digital euro alongside other payment methods.
For Abd El Haj, the objective is straightforward: merchants should not have to manage multiple payment providers or disconnected systems.
Instead, they should be able to accept card payments, digital euro transactions, account-to-account transfers and other payment methods through a single platform, with one reconciliation process and one consolidated view of liquidity, risk and cash flow.
“The digital euro is nothing sinister,” he says. “It’s something which will coexist and will continue to be as part of our portfolio.”
He also sees RS2 playing a wider role by processing digital euro transactions on behalf of smaller banks while enabling other payment providers to operate through its licensed entity in Germany. His ambition is not simply to process payments but to help create a seamless payments environment across the eurozone.
“The question is not whether Europe can create a digital euro. The question is whether it can create one that people and businesses genuinely choose for its user experience, and because it is a payment method they can trust.”
Whether a customer in Malta purchases goods from a merchant in Spain or elsewhere in Europe, settlement, he believes, should happen almost instantly rather than taking days.
“Exactly. Instant,” he says when discussing the future of cross-border settlement.
The principles won’t change
Although payment technologies continue to evolve rapidly, Abd El Haj argues that the industry’s priorities remain remarkably constant.
Trust.
Security.
Resilience.
User experience.
Those four principles have guided RS2’s strategy for years and, he believes, will remain equally relevant whatever technologies emerge in future.
“We always focus on two things,” he says. “How we can make the life of our consumer easy… how we can make their funds secure and how we can enable them to do transaction globally.”
The same philosophy extends to merchants, who expect reliable payment processing, protection against fraud and uninterrupted service.
Rather than viewing the digital euro as a revolutionary break with existing payment systems, Abd El Haj considers it another payment method that must satisfy exactly the same commercial requirements as every other successful payment solution.
Europe’s strategic opportunity
For Abd El Haj, the digital euro ultimately represents far more than a technological project.
He believes Europe has a unique opportunity to combine the trust associated with central bank money with the innovation of the private sector, creating a payments ecosystem capable of competing globally while reinforcing European financial sovereignty.
Execution, however, will determine success.
“The question is not whether Europe can create a digital euro. The question is whether it can create one that people and businesses genuinely choose because they trust it.”
“The execution of the digital euro will determine its outcome,” he says, expressing hope that Europe will seize the opportunity to build infrastructure combining public trust with private-sector innovation while reducing dependence on third-party payment platforms and technologies.
Implementation, he argues, must remain focused on genuine user needs.
He identifies five priorities that should guide the project: simplicity, security, privacy, resilience and interoperability. If Europe succeeds in delivering those objectives, he believes the digital euro can strengthen the continent’s payments ecosystem across virtually every sector of the economy.
Ultimately, Abd El Haj believes public confidence, not legislation or technology, will determine whether the project succeeds.
As Europe moves steadily towards the next phase of the project, that may prove to be the defining test.
If successful, the digital euro could become the most significant development in the eurozone’s monetary architecture since the introduction of the single currency itself, not simply because it digitises money, but because it has the potential to reshape how Europeans pay, move and access it.
