5. Depolarización celular
6.2 Condiciones de contorno
Borders should be no barrier to payments in the digital age
SPECIAL FEATURE: FINANCIAL INNOVATION
adoption of blockchain. Regulation would be in place to ensure that things are operating properly in a secure and safe way. Ultimately, she emphasised, the adoption and growth of such new technologies need to be driven by market forces.
National difference
Today, different approaches amongst EU member states towards payments persist, both in terms of acceptance and use amongst consumers and businesses as well as payment infrastructure. In some countries, the transition to a cashless society is taking place; in others, the acceptance of cards and electronic payments is much lower. Asked about the transnational barriers and costs in the way of consumers and businesses, Cairns said: “My view is that consumers are the people we should really be serving and they should have a choice. You should be able to choose when you pay, how you pay and what you pay with, and you should have a really good seamless consumer experience. All of this should work in the background.
“When you get up in the morning, you’re not thinking about making a payment, but you might be thinking, ‘I’ll buy myself that tie’. The payment process is happening somewhere mid-cycle after you have already chosen the tie you want to purchase. The consumer wants that to happen in the background in the safest, most efficient and best way possible.” Thus, Cairns emphasised that there remains a need for designing the process from the consumer point of view. In doing so, barriers will actually be tackled: “Creating more local systems across Europe is not going to solve that problem; it’s actually going to go in the opposite direction. Some of the pushes into creating local payment processing companies are not necessarily helpful. Those local companies have to join with other companies when they work across borders, and they probably won’t be able work outside their borders without costs. But what do borders mean in a digital world?”
Cairns pointed to how this can be better leveraged to enable a more innovative future. Arguing that schools ought to teach children computer programming – essentially a language – she said: “You learn languages quickly when you are young. I think here in Europe we have to get the governments, the employers and the education system all working together to say: ‘how do we upskill our population to be effective in the digital age?’ With the advent of digitisation, jobs will go away, but new jobs will be created in the service and commerce sectors. The more educated the population, the more able they are to use digital technology – and with a more entrepreneurial approach – the better.”
She went on to highlight that in contrast to Europe, the United States has embraced a business culture that is much more forgiving of failure. Indeed, Cairns described the environment on the other side of the Atlantic as “refreshing and entrepreneurial”. Further, it remains clear that start-ups and businesses in Europe face more challenges than their counterparts in the US do, with the wider discourse during the summit highlighting this. Access to capital and the approach towards digitalisation are continuing challenges in the European business environment.
New financial tools
Recent years have seen growing interest in the application of new and innovative technologies such as blockchain distributed database technology. Asked how MasterCard is approaching blockchain, Cairns acknowledged the “huge potential” of the technology, saying there will be use cases that extend beyond the financial world.
In complex transactions – such as trade finance – where there are many entities involved, blockchain can help to ease business as a distributed hardened ledger concept that is independently verified. “You can see that blockchain could speed things up,” Cairns said. “It could reduce costs and it could create robustness.”
However, she cautioned, it is not a panacea, and while it may be a “great technological concept”, MasterCard is still working with partners to consider what the best use case for it might be.
As an underlying technology, Cairns said that it would be good to have as little regulation as possible, with market forces working on the
Ann Cairns
President of International Markets MasterCard www.mastercard.com Payments, Cairns stresses, should operate in the background as consumers conduct transactions
Pan European Networks: Government19 www.paneuropeannetworks.com
38
SPECIAL FEATURE: FINANCIAL INNOVATION
factor to be minimised but rather as a bridge to be crossed to unlock new business opportunities. Fourth, there is a great deal of ongoing regulatory activity, which to a large extent is motivated by the three other change drivers, since it concentrates on aspects such as paving the way for increased innovation and transparency across the European payments market, creating a level playing field for competition and enhancing the security of internet payments.
As this description of change drivers already indicates, technology is not only a major change driver per sebut also the elephant in the room when it comes to determining the shape and impact of the three other change drivers. Technology, or the combination of technologies, by itself has the potential to disrupt the traditional behaviour or processing mechanisms of the major actors in transaction banking. Our work
Against this background, the Euro Banking Association (EBA), a pan-European forum for payment practitioners, has been analysing and assessing the potential impact of emerging or rapidly evolving technologies on areas in transaction banking where these technologies could quickly and most easily leave a deep footprint. Considering the use of cryptotechnologies in the area of trade finance, for instance, seemed an almost natural choice because of the perceived benefits this new technological approach could bring to some of the fundamental processes in this area. That is why the topic of applying cryptotechnologies to trade finance was placed on the agenda of the EBA’s working group on cryptotechnologies very shortly after the creation of this dedicated group composed of payment and trade finance professionals.
Before looking more closely at the work of the EBA in this field, we should briefly clarify the definitions of cryptotechnologies and trade
D
igitalisation is changing our daily lives as well as our business environment in unprecedented ways. The banking industry is no exception. There is a strong sense of transformation even in the traditionally more stable areas of transaction banking, such as payments. In this part of the financial industry, the reliable, timely and cost-effective end-to-end delivery of salary and pension payments, of transactions settling electricity bills and paying the rent, has always been a central focus of the main actors running this business, which in the past were mostly banks. The need to create solid infrastructures based on collaboratively developed industry standards and reliable mainframe technology used to naturally slow down the pace of change. Today, there is a shared notion in the industry that the new era of transformation, which for Europe started with the successful implementation of the Single Euro Payments Area, will continue to unfold at an ever increasing speed.Where does this accelerated transformation come from? The increasing digitalisation mentioned above as a first key change driver is obviously underpinned by new technology and new ways of using technology. Second, evolving customer needs and expectations – partly fuelled by the enhanced digital customer experience in other areas of professional and private life – certainly play a crucial role. Third, there are new entrants targeting this alleged ‘bread and butter’ market with their own fresh take on payments. Their approach is often based on business models that do not consider payments as a cost