Benoît Cœuré

Transitioning from a senior role in the Eurosystem to leadership at the BIS Innovation Hub provided a platform to accelerate international research on cross-border payment frictions, tokenised settlement rails and wholesale CBDC interoperability. Publications, speeches and hosted multisided experiments under this leadership set research agendas and produced comparative studies that regulators and infrastructure providers used to benchmark euro-area initiatives. By articulating the trade-offs between innovation, resilience and regulatory harmonisation, influenced national authorities' appetite for pilot participation and informed prudential expectations around reserve backing and interlinking with correspondent banking. The Hub's convening power under this figure helped coordinate multinational pilots where euro-denominated tokens were tested alongside other jurisdictions' CBDC prototypes, affecting technical interoperability expectations, messaging about cross-border use cases, and the perceived readiness of the euro to function as a tokenised settlement medium in broader global experiments.