The EBA, EIOPA and ESMA named AI and tokenization as the 2027 focus of their joint work programme.
The three European supervisory authorities published their 2027 Joint Committee Work Programme on 13 October 2026, and gave artificial intelligence and tokenization its special focus. The three are the European Banking Authority, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and the European Securities and Markets Authority, known together as the ESAs.
If you hold crypto and were waiting for a European rule to act on, this is not one. The programme is a plan for regulators, not a law. No issuer, exchange or wallet takes on a new obligation because of it, and nothing in it starts on a fixed date in 2027. What it tells you is where the EBA, EIOPA and ESMA intend to spend their attention next, and what they plan to ask the industry about first.
The most concrete piece of tokenization work with a deadline attached sits outside the joint programme, in a separate ESMA consultation. More on that below.
The 2027 special focus on AI and tokenization has one named deliverable: a thematic section inside the key innovation trends factsheet, describing use cases and summarising opportunities and risks. Those deliverables and focus areas could still change, the programme says, based on further discussions with European Forum for Innovation Facilitators members at the September and November EFIF meetings.
The programme also names the tone it wants the work judged by: the Joint Committee will implement its 2027 activities, deliverables and coordination mechanisms in the context of simplification and burden reduction. A third data collection exercise on BigTechs and Mixed Activity Groups providing financial services in the EU is planned as well.
For comparison, the same document puts securitisation on a different track. The Commission's June 2025 securitisation package has been in trilogues since June 2026, with implementation currently expected in the first or second quarter of 2027. That is what a file heading towards law looks like in the document where the tokenization work appears as a study.
The reason the ESAs give for the focus is a divergence they spotted during 2026. Enquiries to their innovation hubs about smart contracts, distributed ledger technology and tokenization use cases increased, and crypto-asset issuance and offering activity did not increase with them.
This may suggest a shift towards tokenisation, which will be further explored in 2027.
That is a cautious reading of their own data, and it is worth being precise about what it claims. It says enquiries changed. It does not say money moved, that volumes grew, or that banks are issuing tokenized products at scale.
On 9 October 2026 ESMA launched a Call for Evidence on the potential use of tokenized collateral by central counterparties. Contributions are due by 15 January 2027. ESMA will assess the feedback in the first quarter of 2027 and then decide on any regulatory or supervisory convergence action within its remit.
Collateral is the assets a clearing house holds against a member's positions, so accepting a tokenized version is a question about whether it can be valued and sold quickly when a member fails.
The call covers three models: tokenized versions of assets held in traditional infrastructures, which ESMA calls "digital twins", assets issued directly on distributed ledger technology, and hybrid arrangements.
Tokenisation is moving from testing to real-world use in financial markets, with collateral mobilisation emerging as particularly relevant for central clearing.
Separately, on 23 September 2026, ESMA announced a new Union Strategic Supervisory Priority on digital innovation, to launch from 2027, with an initial focus on how supervised entities use AI and tokenization. It runs alongside the cyber and operational resilience priority in place since 2025.
The planned supervisory action is to map how firms already use or plan to use AI and tokenization in processes and products that directly affect clients, beyond back-office tasks. ESMA's factsheet names the priority Innovation with Investor Safeguards, and says firms are increasingly using AI and tokenized products in day-to-day financial services to gain market share.
ESMA's own 2027 work programme defines tokenization as the issuance, trading and settlement of financial instruments using DLT, which "may significantly reshape how market structures, post-trade arrangements and the interaction between traditional and DLT-based financial market infrastructures" work. It will assess challenges including interoperability, settlement arrangements, custody and legal certainty, and feed those into the upcoming review of the DLT Pilot Regulation.
The EBA published its own 2027 Work Programme on 30 September 2026, adopted by its Board of Supervisors on 29 September 2026, and calls it the first step towards a broader medium-term strategy. In 2027 the EBA will extend previous years' analysis of tokenized settlement assets to the challenges, opportunities and trends in the provision of tokenized investment products by EU banks.
The EBA also describes itself as supervisor of significant issuers of crypto-asset tokens under MiCA, and says it stands ready to support the Commission on follow-up to the May 2026 targeted consultation on the MiCA review and the EBA's September 2026 response. It frames rapid innovation, including crypto-assets, tokenization and digital infrastructure, as reshaping banking and payments, "introducing new vulnerabilities along with opportunities."
Nothing in the joint work programme sets stablecoin rules, and the ESA documents we read do not set out new reserve or redemption requirements. The stablecoin content sits in ESMA's response to the Commission's MiCA review consultation, where it recommends explicit rules to stop regulated crypto firms offering services linked to stablecoins that do not comply with MiCA. The same response calls for a framework for tokenized securities and on-chain settlement.
Recommendations to the Commission are not rules. They are ESMA's position, and the Commission decides what to propose.
Two gaps are worth naming. The documents we read do not mention tokenized Treasuries, the government bond funds often cited as the most obvious use case for tokenized collateral, so we cannot say where they fit in this work. And there is no EIOPA-specific tokenization document: the insurance and pensions authority appears through the joint three-ESA programme rather than through a paper of its own.
The next fixed dates are 15 January 2027 for the collateral feedback and the first quarter of 2027 for ESMA's assessment of it. The joint programme itself can still move before then, since its deliverables and focus areas remain open to adjustment at the November EFIF meeting.
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