“The main attraction for me of this business-to-business (B2B) project, undertaken with Accenture and the ECB, was to capture practical CBDC design and conditional payment learnings from the real world and establish a case study pilot.”
“The project has delivered a template for us at Siemens to learn about how best to automate and connect manufacturing and financial processes together to achieve end-to-end efficiency,” explains Nix, as he outlined the key aim of making machines and money move in sync.
Linking operational events directly to a programmable fast automated payment, with all associated data, removes artificial boundaries such as buffers, prepayments, safety stocks and working capital cushions that persist when full integration isn’t pursued.
“Conditional payments allow us to synchronise customers, manufacturers, suppliers, shippers, and so on in a shared workflow with associated triggered payments, once a production or process step is met,” adds Nix, while extolling the benefits of this scenario.
“From a technical perspective, the underlying payment rail was not the primary focus of the project. What mattered most to us at Siemens was the ability to explore automation and programmability in a realistic environment. The digital euro provided a particularly valuable future-oriented test bed for this. It could just as easily have been the existing SEPA Instant Payments rail,” concludes Nix, as he explained the detail of the conditional payments trial completed last year.
“We chose the digital euro, due in 2029, as the experimental payment rail for this B2B project because of the future reach of the euro CBDC ecosystem, which could eventually span 21 countries,” he adds. “It also enables a feature that today is typically only available with credit cards – namely, the ability to reserve funds in advance and release them with a business event.”
“This gives suppliers certainty that liquidity is committed, while customers retain control, until value is actually delivered. It is important to stress that we only moved theoretical tokens – not actual money – in this feasibility study.”
“But we still got great learnings,” maintains Nix, as he outlined how industrial processes and operations can be better aligned with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) world from which it has traditionally been disconnected.”
“For the project, Siemens utilised an internal additive manufacturing setup to provide a 3D printer environment. In this scenario, the internal manufacturing unit was responsible for ordering and paying for a spare conveyor part, as an example product. Each component part, production stage and associated payment was automatically triggered by pre-programmed progress milestones.”
Automation benefits treasuries but changes the role
“Removing paperwork from payments was genuinely refreshing,” continues Nix, as he stressed the efficiency benefits, particularly the ability to hold on to cash to sweat liquidity until the very last minute because a conditional payment is released only when it is needed.”
“But it is not only about cash management. It is also about cash application. When billing and payment happen synchronously, payments are directly linked to the underlying customer or delivery event. This makes cash application significantly simpler, faster and more accurate.”
“Combining industrial and financial automation in this way delivers a real-time, data-centric treasury with far greater visibility. Treasury’s role shifts from processing individual transactions to overseeing automated processes, defining rules and controls, and managing risk. This is the future of treasury – not basic cash management or sending payments around the world, as we’ve now proven this can be automated.”
“Business hour operations and mentalities are declining as 24/7 always-on machines and constant payment rail availability spreads in an ever more digital world. This points to a future without cut-offs, with direct implications for liquidity optimisation, funding, foreign exchange (FX), and many other aspects of corporate treasuries.”
IoT
The idea of the Internet of Things (IoT), the so-called fourth industrial revolution, has been around for a long time. It is based on the vision of connected devices sharing data and triggering actions automatically. That vision is getting nearer as technology advances and finds concrete business applications.
“In our use case, the core idea is that spare parts are not held in stock but produced on demand, with CAD files stored digitally and parts printed only when a real need arises. Defined production and logistical steps, such as a print job starting, a component being completed, or a part being shipped, then act as factual, machine-generated triggers for payment.”
“As operational data increasingly becomes the trigger for automated actions, data quality at source becomes critical. If machines are allowed to initiate financial events, the underlying data must be accurate, reliable and trustworthy, as errors can no longer be corrected later through manual checks or reconciliations.”
“This does not mean that machines themselves need to hold wallets or balances,” continues Nix. “In practice, machines act as trusted trigger points, while liquidity remains centrally managed on corporate bank accounts or wallets under full treasury control. Distributing liquidity across individual machine wallets would add unnecessary operational and risk complexity, without delivering clear benefits.”
Deeper and deeper integration between operational and financial processes will increasingly become the norm in the 21st century, as machines operate continuously and business events occur in real time.
Accenture and Siemens cooperate on ECB project
This particular pilot project was achieved with the help of Accenture, which developed the Conditional Payment Module (CPM) and linked it to Siemens’ internal production and process environment as well as the digital euro Service Platform (DESP) to initiate the payments based on the ECB’s digital wallets.
The CPM acts as orchestration layer that bridges industrial processes and financial settlement. Accenture built the smart contract instructions on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, backed by the use of open application programming interfaces (APIs), which enable easier connectivity and data exchange. A governance structure was built as part of the smart contract to ensure that machine-triggered actions operated within clearly defined rules and controls.
“You’re effectively delegating decision-making power to a smart contract, so the governance aspect is particularly crucial,” explains Nix. “This drove much of the programming work, which took around 30 days for this project – largely due to the need to develop and test the control logic.”
This setup now provides a template that can be applied across different use cases, payment rails and geographies, demonstrating that the underlying logic is not tied to a single platform or market. In practice, the same orchestration can sit on top of existing real-time rails or integrate with established payment ecosystems.
“We are very interested in blockchain technology and have been running programmable payment use cases in production with J.P. Morgan on its Kinexys platform since 2021,” notes Nix, underlining Siemens’ approach of not locking into a single technology, provider, or payment rail. He stresses the key learnings are twofold:
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Firstly, the importance of using regulated fiat money on innovative platforms to ensure smooth integration with treasury and accounting standards.
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Secondly, the need for reliable, well-governed programmability to automate finance and treasury workflows safely.
“This joint ECB and Accenture project is another learning journey for us,” adds Nix. “From that perspective, the digital euro is particularly interesting as a longer-term test bed. While the payment rail itself is not critical from a technical standpoint, central bank backing can make a real difference for widescale adoption, as corporates and banks are generally more willing to join a network anchored by a central bank than a proprietary one.”
Innovation platform
The ECB’s Innovation programme attracted 70 participants, comprising merchants, banks and others from across the continent, exploring the possibilities of the digital euro. Participants were divided into Pioneers and Visionaries. Siemens and Accenture, as part of the Pioneers, built real showcases, while Visionaries from fintechs and start-ups also contributed ideas.
An ECB report was published in September 2025, outlining some of the key projects that were tested last year as potential future applications of the central bank digital currency (CBDC).
PayperChain, piloted an embedded pay-per-use solution involving industrial machinery, for example, which is for hire on a consumption billing basis. Meanwhile, Traxpay contributed a supply chain finance (SCF) 2.0 solution based on their Digital Negotiable Instruments (DNI), particularly digital bills of exchange that they have delivered with their technology partner enigio. The ECB use case here was to explore how programmable money could automate invoice settlement in combination with milestone-based triggering.
Siemens’ project contributed a concrete industrial use case to the programme. The company intends to pursue this approach further using existing payment rails and conditional payments, while the ECB gears up for its CBDC towards the end of the decade.
Conclusions
Invited to look ahead to the potential impact of CBDCs over the next decade, and the ECB’s ambition to use a future digital euro as a platform for developing Europe’s own payment ecosystem that it controls, Nix is cautious. “I can’t predict what will happen in four years’ time,” he says, “but what I can say is that programmability will be key in a machine economy, where financial transactions are triggered by real business events.”
“I also think that this project has helped me personally to visualise how the future of cash management will evolve,” adds Nix. “The emphasis has traditionally been on control, efficiency and reliability. As financial processes become more data- and event-driven, the role shifts more toward risk oversight and governance, allowing treasury to contribute more directly to business success.”
