Sovereignty and Resilience in Digital Payments: Keynote by Danmarks Nationalbank Governor Ulrik Nødgaard

Danmarks Nationalbank Governor Ulrik Nødgaard argued that after years of central banks focusing on payment competition and efficiency, resilience and sovereignty are now the real priorities — and walked through what that looks liked both in Denmark's cash-free economy today and in tomorrow's tokenized one.

Real-world proof that two payment rails beat one: during an actual outage at a major Danish card processor, stores that already had instant payments enabled saw usage spike dramatically

That's the evidence behind Denmark's push to get its instant payment app, MobilePay, working in physical stores too — not just for peer-to-peer transfers — so there was already a second rail people know how to use if the card network goes down. Nødgaard applied the same logic looking ahead: a digital euro or digital krone would boost resilience the same way, simply by existing as a real alternative rail.

Denmark sees no case for a digital krone right now, but is positioning itself to move fast if the digital euro proves useful

Danish banks are participating in a stablecoin pilot, not because Nødgaard wants a strong euro stablecoin, but to get them "acquainted with the tokenized universe" before it becomes unavoidable. On CBDCs, his advice to politicians is that Denmark doesn't need one yet — its existing nationwide payment rails already solve the fragmentation problem the digital euro is designed to fix elsewhere. But since Denmark was already the first non-euro country fully plugged into the ECB's multi-currency settlement infrastructure (TARGET, TIPS, and T2S), it could adopt a digital krone on that same platform quickly — potentially as early as the early 2030s — if the digital euro project delivers genuinely useful innovations, like offline payment resilience.

Speaker:

Ulrik Nødgaard, Governor, Danmarks Nationalbank

Point Zero Forum 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland