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Regulation, dialogue, harmonisation, digitisation and acceleration are the five key words that immediately come to my mind to describe such evolution.
Let me start with regulation: the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)) end-date Regulation which made the migration to a full reality, the revised Payment Services Directive ( PSD) which brought more security requirements and created the first legal framework for what got called “open banking” (but the lessons of which should be learned for its forthcoming review), the General Data Protection Regulation which was a landmark legislation on the data protection front (which however created some (most likely unintended) obstacles for the payment industry to fight effectively against payment fraud).
Dialogue between all stakeholders became a fundamental, permanent feature and success factor for developing and evolving European payments (e.g. the payment schemes at EU level), which the best way to meet market needs and foster wide adoption, whilst ensuring consistency with European public policy objectives.
Harmonisation is what the EPC has relentlessly tried to facilitate to achieve the vision through payment and payment-related schemes and related initiatives (e.g. a QR-code standard to support
(Inst)-based payment transactions at the Point of Interaction (POI)). On the other hand, the European payment landscape although integrated is still characterised by a significant diversity of behaviours and situations at country level in spite of common trends and achievements.
Digitisation of payments is best illustrated by the strong decrease of the share of cash in day-to-day, face-to-face retail payments over the last decade even though there remains a large degree of heterogeneity in cash usage patterns across Europe.
Not to forget the acceleration of the evolution of the European payment landscape due to the following main drivers: regulation, customer behaviour change, technological progress and of course the Covid-19 pandemic. This trend should however not leave behind those European citizens that are more vulnerable and/or find it hard to cope with such change.
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