Archives of Edito - FRANCE PAYMENTS FORUM

What future for European payment systems?

Time for big questions... and big decisions Hervé SITRUK, President and Founder In the current phase, which we all hope will be the one to emerge from the pandemic, several developments will intensify and strongly influence the world of payments, such as contactless payment and the fingerprint biometric card, Instant Payment, mobile payment, Request To Pay, or the deployment of the ISO 20022.... standard And, most likely, blockchains and cryptopayments. Some predict a new post-COVID world payment order. In any case, the GAFAs and other BATX are actively preparing for it, and dream of "redefining financial intermediation", according to the formula of François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France, with solutions of continuity and others of rupture. In the continuity phase, we are seeing the emergence of multiple XPay offers with known payment methods such as mobile payment, which are based on solutions provided by banks and the current cashless payment industry. [...]

Despite BREXIT, the Europe of Payments is alive and must continue to move forward

We lost a major player in European payments on Saturday 1 February, with the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. A key and powerful player, an innovative and pioneering player in many cases, and a player convinced of the importance of a business model to support the digital revolution. This is a major collective failure, which should not prevent us from moving forward and pursuing our objective of "major, decisive and bold steps towards European sovereignty" in payments and to avoid new departures of European players. However, we must remain ambitious, and put forward our objective of a "seamless" Europe of payments ("seamless" would say our English friends) and the ability of the European payments industry to take up the digital challenge, and to build champions able to compete with the American or Asian monsters. This will certainly not be as easy as it was with our British friends with us. But, [...]