ECB: Cipollone says heavy reliance on retail payments is an issue that needs to be addressed

Solutions and channels outside the EU: system resilience at risk

"The time has come to tackle our dependencies in the retail payments sector and turn things around. Fortunately, we have the capacity to do so." So said Piero Cipollone, a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank, at the ‘Eighty Years of the Republic’ conference at Sapienza University.

"As a central bank, we must ensure that external dependencies in payments and finance do not undermine Europe’s monetary sovereignty, which has been hard-won" he argued, noting that “at present” we are “in a situation of heavy dependence in retail payments, where we rely heavily on a small number of non-European payment solutions and channels”.

This situation “jeopardises the resilience” of payment systems on our continent: “Debit card payments provide a striking example. International payment networks handle two-thirds of card payments in the euro area. Thirteen out of the twenty-one countries in the euro area do not even have a national card network. There is still no European solution capable of operating across the entire euro area for all digital payments.

"In a fragmented world, we can no longer afford to rely on non-European solutions for something as fundamental as day-to-day payments."