Connective Payments Insights

You may not have noticed it yet, but in Brussels, Frankfurt and elsewhere, IT specialists, lawyers, financial specialists, behavioural scientists and many other project members are steadily working on the preparation of a digital euro. In this audio article, Ronald te Velde and Hans Croon explain the main characteristics of this European CBDC in the making, and the challenges facing banks, PSPs and the regulators to fit the digital euro into their strategies.

Connective Payments consultants and project leaders have been contributing intensively to the Dutch DCA (Debit Card Acceptance) program, to enable the transition from V PAY and Maestro to VISA Debit and Debit Mastercard respectively. This spoken article tells you all about the results now the the projects finished.

An exciting development this summer: four years after the announcement of the European Payments Initiative (EPI), the first EPI application will finally go live. The digital wallet, called Wero, will launch in Germany, Belgium and France. Backed by 14 major Eurozone banks and acquirers Worldline and Nets, the EPI has set itself the goal of building a unified pan-European payment system, offering a digital wallet, initially to support P2P and consumer-to-business payments, in 2025-26 followed by online and mobile shopping payments and ultimately point-of-sale payments and digital identity.

While Open Banking on the European mainland is still not functioning as smoothly as the European Commission had envisioned at the start of PSD2 in 2015, the next phase in the financial data unlocking project is already underway. Open Finance will lead to banks sharing (much) more financial data from their customers with authorised third parties. Open Finance should open up a much greater potential for banks than Open Banking. That is why banks should embrace Open Finance to boost their revenues.

An onboarding process with a state-of-the-art user experience, while ensuring compliance with legal requirements and limiting the risk of fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes, should be central to your business strategy. Designing and executing it can rightly be called an art: the Art of Onboarding.  This episode of Connective Payments Insights is about a benchmark research we conducted last year into the onboarding processes at 13 financial institutions active in the Netherlands, aimed at small and medium sized business clients. 

SPAA, an initiative of the European Payment Council (EPC), is a new, voluntary payment scheme. Enrollment  for banks and third-party providers has opened on 1 September 2023. The scheme's ambition is to drive ‘open payments’ in Europe and to become the de facto European standard in the field of open banking.

As the end of the investigation phase comes into view, it is noticeable that the discussion about the digital euro is definitely shifting from the technological to the political domain. The European Parliament is playing an increasing role in the discussion, among others with papers casting doubt on the attractiveness of a digital euro. Meanwhile, the Eurosystem is trying to generate public interest in the project, including through surveys of focus groups in the various euro area countries.

Anyone who travels through Europe by public transport shares the experience that it is not always clear how to pay your fare. Payment methods and schemes for public transport vary significantly across European countries, reflecting cultural, technological, and economic differences. Is there a trend towards standardisation, which would be in the interest of foreign travellers? And what trends do we distinguish?

As the European Commission is still busy evaluating the impact of the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), the banking community is looking beyond the Directive and preparing a new scheme for open banking, called SEPA Account Access (SPAA). In this podcast you will get an update on recent developments.

At a time when banks are becoming more cautious about lending to small and medium-sized businesses, opportunities are emerging for non-banks to offer banking services to these customers. Accountancy software suppliers have begun leveraging their customer data to offer financial products and payment services to their portfolio, thereby competing with traditional retail banks. Indeed, ’embedded finance’ is disrupting the banking industry and forcing traditional banks to adapt and innovate to remain competitive. However, whether this development will really take off depends on many factors, touched upon in this podcast.