Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
On our retail payments strategy and the digital euro project, both of which seek to foster innovation, safety and strategic autonomy in European payments. Today I will look back at the progress made in the last two decades and outline the remaining steps that need to be taken to overcome fragmentation on the customer-facing side of payment services. I will then explain how the digital euro could make it easier to achieve the objectives of our retail payments strategy, in particular the creation of a truly pan-European payment solution, the full deployment of instant payments and support for innovation and digitalisation.[7] My main message is that, in order to successfully meet the challenges we face, we need the same cooperation between the public and private sectors that has been the hallmark of our success in building the European payments market over the last 20 years. The payment market is developing at a fast pace and we need to jointly feel the urgency to deliver on the needs of Europeans.The progress made towards a Single Euro Payments AreaEuropean integration reflects a political vision – a continuous effort to bring European countries closer together to secure peace, freedom and prosperity. Completing Economic and Monetary Union and the Single Market is a key part of that vision.[8] In the payments sector, this requires Europeans to be able to pay seamlessly, and PSPs to be able to operate, compete and innovate across the Union. Early efforts in this area focused on unifying central bank money. The cash changeover in 2002 marked a turning point in Europe’s integration. The new euro banknotes successfully replaced the legacy banknotes of the Member States and rapidly became the most tangible expression of monetary unification. Today, euro banknotes are the most popular instrument for in-person payments, although their use is declining as consumers are increasingly paying digitally.[9]In parallel, the Eurosystem also made enormous efforts to rapidly integrate wholesale payment systems, which support large payments between financial intermediaries. The transition from the national real-time gross settlement systems[10] to a European system – with the launch of the TARGET system in successive waves[11] – created an efficient infrastructure for wholesale payments in central bank money accessible by European banks throughout the euro area. In other words, banks already benefit from a wholesale central bank digital currency (wholesale CBDC).Euro banknotes and our wholesale CBDC (in the form of TARGET services) have ensured
Add Comment