Piero Cipollone: Next-day securities settlement, tokenisation and the transformation of Europe’s financial infrastructure

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Europe will transition from T+2 to T+1 securities settlement on 11 October 2027, in order to shorten the time between trading and settlement and reduce market and counterparty risk.

The Eurosystem is adjusting the night-time settlement process of the TARGET2-Securities (T2S) platform, with changes planned for completion in June 2027 to align with the T+1 migration.

Since 30 March, the Eurosystem has accepted marketable assets issued using distributed ledger technology (DLT) at central securities depositories as eligible collateral for credit operations; since 21 September, the Pontes platform has supported wholesale transactions settling tokenised assets in central bank money.

The Appia project aims to explore building an integrated European tokenised financial ecosystem around common standards, with the goal of delivering a blueprint by 2028.