Alias

An alias lets someone pay you without knowing your account number. In practice, it is how a person-to-person payment gets to feel like sending a message rather than filling in a bank form.

What it actually is#

An alias is a unique pseudonymous identifier used to protect a user's identity when digital euro payments are processed. The crucial property is who can resolve it back to a person: only the PSP distributing the digital euro, or the user themselves. To everyone else in the flow, it is an opaque handle.

That is a meaningfully different privacy posture from an IBAN, which carries the account holder's name alongside it in most European payment flows.

The alias look-up service#

An alias only works if something can map it to a destination. That is the job of the alias look-up service, which maps an identifier linked to a digital euro user — such as an optional mobile phone number, or a DEAN — to the corresponding PSP.

So the resolution path is: alias → the PSP that holds the account. The look-up service tells the payment where to go without broadcasting who is behind it.

Who gets one#

The rules here are strict and asymmetric:

The 1:1 rule is the part to hold on to. A phone number maps to exactly one digital euro account, and an account has at most one alias. There is no many-to-one fan-out, no sharing a number across accounts, no registering five aliases for one account.

Businesses get no aliases at all. A business is paid through acceptance flows — a QR code, a terminal, an e-commerce checkout — not by someone typing its phone number.