Background & Biography
A Sciences Po Paris graduate, Assouan joined the Banque de France in 1997 as a banking-supervision inspector. She became director of payment systems and market infrastructures in 2016 and deputy director general for financial stability and operations in 2019. From 2020 to 2023, she also served as an ACPR deputy secretary general responsible for financial stability. In January 2023, she became director general for financial stability and operations and chair of the bank’s Climate and Nature Centre.
Her appointment as ACPR Secretary General took effect on 2 March 2026. The authority describes the office as responsible for running its departments and reporting to the Supervisory College. Its operational responsibilities include authorisations, bank and insurance inspections, business-practice supervision, anti-money-laundering supervision and risk analysis. The organisation also identifies functional autonomy for the Resolution Directorate and the Sanctions Committee’s secretariat. Those distinctions matter when describing her remit: the title does not make every institutional decision a personal act.
Notable Contributions
In the Banque de France’s July 2023 account of twelve wholesale-CBDC experiments, Assouan explained why interoperability should be considered at the design stage. She anticipated that several distributed-ledger networks carrying central-bank money could coexist internationally, and warned against reproducing the difficulties of connecting existing settlement systems. She also described the bank’s DL3S solution as capable of interacting with TARGET infrastructure and other distributed ledgers. These were her published assessments of a collaborative experimental programme, rather than evidence that she personally designed every component.
Project Mariana gave that international question a specific test case. Announced in September 2023 by the BIS and the central banks of France, Singapore and Switzerland, the proof of concept used hypothetical currencies and simulated financial institutions. It combined a shared token standard, bridges between networks and an automated market maker for foreign-exchange transactions. Assouan highlighted the potential connection between a global exchange network and regional issuance platforms. The partners explicitly described Mariana as experimental and said it did not establish an intention to issue wholesale CBDCs or endorse decentralised finance.
Her September 2024 OMFIF essay made the policy argument in her own name. She identified slow cross-border payments and manual processes in parts of financial markets as problems worth addressing. Her proposed approach paired experimentation with a suitable regulatory framework, preservation of central-bank money’s settlement role and attention to liquidity and fragmentation. She also argued for international cooperation before new infrastructures became operational. The essay, adapted from a speech, presents tokenisation as conditional on those safeguards; its discussion of efficiency is an argument about potential benefits, rather than an independent measurement of results.
The October 2025 Pythagore announcement applied tokenisation to a defined market: Negotiable European Commercial Paper, or NEU CP. Banque de France and Euroclear proposed using distributed-ledger technology for short-term debt. Assouan’s attributed statement linked the project to greater automation, transparency and European market integration. The announcement envisaged a pilot beginning in late 2026, aligned with the Eurosystem’s Pontes project. It therefore documents a development plan and her explanation of its policy relevance; it does not demonstrate that the planned pilot was already operating.
At BNP Paribas’ 2025 Global Official Institutions Conference, she discussed the Banque de France’s involvement in experimentation around Slovenia’s digital bond. The bank had participated both as provider of tokenised settlement money and as a secondary-market investor. Assouan used that experience to emphasise interoperability between existing and tokenised systems. BNP Paribas published the discussion and transcript as a transaction participant and event organiser, so its account is a primary industry source rather than independent performance validation.
Why Katharos.ai Follows Emmanuelle Assouan
Independent reporting by Shanny Basar in Markets Media records her contribution to AFME’s May 2025 European Financial Integration Conference. Assouan argued that blockchain might address some barriers to integrated European markets, including by placing environmental, social and governance information in smart contracts. She also identified prerequisites: protecting the monetary system’s stability and maintaining safeguards around private actors and private money, including stablecoins. This reporting connects her technological interests with the conditions she believes should govern adoption.
Katharos.ai’s interest lies in that combination of operational experience and public policy explanation. Her statements on experimentation offer concrete questions for evaluating new infrastructure: whether different systems can interact, which asset completes settlement and how existing arrangements remain usable. Following those questions is more informative than treating a successful demonstration as a complete market transformation.
Areas to Follow
Her move to the ACPR gives the payments discussion a supervisory setting. In a July 2026 article, the authority reported that she had addressed AFÉPAME on 25 June and called for European responses combining private initiatives, established institutions and public actors. The same article discusses electronic-money tokens and their relationship with payment services. Those wider regulatory explanations belong to the ACPR’s institutional account; they should not all be attributed to Assouan as personal statements.
Pythagore provides a specific development to track against its original timetable. Relevant evidence would include a documented pilot, participating issuers and investors, the settlement arrangement actually used and the connection with existing infrastructure. The October 2025 release described intended operational and administrative improvements. Assessing those goals requires later implementation evidence, rather than converting an announced ambition into an achieved result.
A further question is the European unified-ledger possibility discussed in her OMFIF essay. She proposed exploring how tokenised assets could coexist with central-bank and commercial-bank money while supporting cross-border investment. That was an exploration of future architecture, with existing infrastructure continuing to matter.
Reporting Scope
This profile covers documented professional positions, personally attributed remarks, an authored essay and independently reported conference contributions. Institutional announcements establish what projects proposed or tested; they do not independently certify commercial efficiency or universal suitability. Credit for collaborative experiments remains with the participating organisations and teams. The profile does not assign Assouan sole authorship of their technical results.
France describes her current professional institutional remit. It is not a statement about citizenship, private residence or personal financial interests.
Areas of Influence
Policy & Regulation reflects her ACPR leadership and supervisory context. Stablecoins & Payments reflects the connection between regulated private money, payments and central-bank settlement. Exchanges & Infrastructure reflects her public work on interoperability and tokenised financial markets. Across these areas, the recurring issue is how new mechanisms fit into the institutions and safeguards on which financial users already rely.
Photo attribution
Emmanuelle Assouan. Photo source: Banque de France institutional website: https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/emmanuelle-assouan. Supplied file last modified 20 November 2025 (HTTP header); photographer and capture date unstated. Site footer: ©2026 Banque de France. Terms: https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/infos-legales. Native 600×520 image cropped to 592×333 (16:9); full head retained, no retouching.
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