Infrastructure, anti-fraud measures and AI: this is the future of digital payments
In 2025, the total value of cashless payments in Italia exceeded the symbolic threshold of €500 billion for the first time, reaching €518 billion (45% of Italians’ total spending), according to the Innovative Payments Observatory at the Politecnico di Milano. Electronic transactions have tripled compared to ten years ago and over the last three years have grown at an average annual rate of 9.5 per cent. The shift away from cash, already recorded in 2024, is becoming established. Italia, however, still ranks 21st out of 27 EU countries in the 2026 Cashless Society Index compiled by the Teha Group, with 181.4 digital transactions per capita, compared to a European average of 246.8. The potential is enormous: if Italy were to align itself with the continent’s best performers, the market could unlock a further €123 billion. This represents a strategic lever not only for businesses in the sector, but for the country’s overall competitiveness.
Regulation drives change
This structural transformation is being driven by relentless regulatory work. The entry into force of the Instant Payments Regulation, which since October 2025 has required European financial institutions to offer instant payments at costs equivalent to those of standard payments, has given the entire sector an unprecedented boost. At the same time, the Verification of Payee (VoP) has redefined the rules of transaction security, requiring Payment Service Providers to carry out a mandatory, pre-transaction check on the beneficiary’s identity before any payment is processed. These are not merely technical requirements: they are changes that redefine the relationships of trust between citizens, businesses and the banking system.
The fraud landscape is also becoming more complex. According to the “Report on Fraudulent Payment Transactions in Italia – First Half of 2025” published by the Bank of Italy in February 2026, the overall fraud rate remains statistically low (12 fraudulent cases per 100,000 transactions and €3 per €100,000 transacted), but financial crime is changing form. Fraud is becoming more targeted, more sophisticated, and concentrated on digital channels and cross-border transactions. Transactions to non-EEA countries, whilst accounting for just 3% of card and e-money payments, account for around a fifth of the fraud committed using those same instruments. Electronic money shows rising rates: 0.031% by value, compared with 0.027% in the previous six-month period.
The strengthening of national assets takes on, in this scenario of strong growth, a significance that goes beyond the technological dimension, contributing to the competitiveness of the national economy, its integration into the European payments market and security.
A new infrastructure for a cutting-edge system
It is not just about data and regulations. The scale of the change underway is also reflected in technological innovations, which are becoming increasingly strategic and significant. Just a few weeks ago, an announcement was made that is set to transform the national financial infrastructure: the benefit corporation CBI will develop and manage the new CBI-Comp, the multilateral clearing system for domestic retail payments, such as cheques, commercial collections and ATM transactions.
The infrastructure will replace BI-Comp, the Bank of Italia’s clearing system which, in 2025, processed the balances of over 2.1 billion transactions, with a total value exceeding €736 billion. An extraordinary volume of daily transactions will now be managed by a private, scalable, modern infrastructure.
The Steering Committee of CIPA – the Interbank Agreement for Automation between the Bank of Italia, the ABI, banks and other financial institutions – has approved the solution chosen by the market, identifying CBI as the entity responsible for overseeing the implementation and management of the new clearing solution as part of an evaluation process launched after the Bank of Italia had expressed its intention to phase out BI-Comp. The banks’ decision confirms their confidence in CBI’s technical expertise and its ability to operate within a highly complex framework.
How CBI-Comp works
CBI-Comp will clear and send for settlement in central bank money the net balances of domestic payments denominated in euros exchanged between Payment Service Providers, maintaining high standards of security, cost predictability, continuity and reliability. The system will be subject to supervision by the Bank of Italia, as required by the current regulatory framework. The most significant aspect, however, is strategic: CBI is thus moving from a messaging-based model to a direct role in the core dynamics of payments, strengthening the national infrastructure and making a concrete contribution to the modernisation and competitiveness of the country’s economy.
Security and innovation: the drivers of growth
Innovation has always been in CBI’s DNA, and the company has succeeded in establishing itself as a benchmark for the Italian digital payments system. Among the services with the greatest impact, for example, is CBI Name Check, the Verification of Payee solution developed in accordance with the EPC (European Payments Council) scheme. The service verifies in real time the correct match between the IBAN code and the name of the payment beneficiary before the transaction is executed: a bulwark against some of the most insidious and widespread forms of fraud. Thanks to this service, any mismatch between the name of the genuine supplier and the holder of the fraudulent IBAN is flagged before the transfer is executed, preventing the payer from falling victim to the scam. The same protection mechanism operates in the event of tampering with bank details during the transmission of an invoice. CBI Name Check processes an average of 5 million checks per day and 150 million checks per month, with between 15% and 20% of these coming from European PSPs. CBI has been granted RVM (Routing and Verification Mechanism) status by the EPC.
Another frontier in which CBI is investing heavily is Request to Pay (RTP), the service that digitises payment requests for both the public and private sectors. Rather than requiring the debtor to search for payment details, it is the creditor who sends a digital request that the customer can accept, reject or negotiate directly via their online banking or app. The customer ceases to be a passive party and becomes a prosumer, actively participating in the collection process, choosing payment methods and times, and helping to build a more balanced and transparent commercial relationship.
Looking to the future, two themes dominate CBI’s strategic agenda: Agentic AI and the Digital Euro. Both represent systemic discontinuities, not merely incremental developments. Agentic AI is already a reality in the financial industry: today, 92% of European banks use AI solutions, primarily for risk management, security and customer experience. In the payments sector, this technology promises to revolutionise the interaction between user and system. CBI intends to be at the forefront of this transition, bringing its infrastructure expertise into the era of agentic payments.
As for the Digital Euro, the project entered the ‘Development Phase’ in 2026, set to continue until 2029, the year in which the first issuance is scheduled. The ECB estimates the implementation cost for credit institutions at €1.4 billion per year for four years: approximately 3% of annual investment in IT services. CBI aims to be a benchmark for the management and interoperability between traditional euro accounts and digital euro accounts, including for corporate cash management.
