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 an...

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...

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...

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 conduc...

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 intere...

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...

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 fina...

Whether you need to employ compliance specialists on a permanent basis depends on a lot of factors, such as the size and type of organisation, the product portfolio and relevant laws and regulations. In addition, the same questions are raised as with any Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) decision.  Compliance om demand, a service by Connective Payments specialists, is valuable because we hav...

Until recently, there was little public interest in CBDCs and the digital euro in particular. But in the Netherlands, criticism is growing of the technocratic nature of the process, which seems to take place largely outside the political arena. The subject also seems to be coming to life in the (social) media. Doubts are widely shared within the House of Representatives and mainly concern the lack...

The online payment processor Wirecard turned out to be a fraudulent money machine of a bunch of megalomaniac managers, who eventually got entangled in their own web. That sounded like the scenario of an exciting movie and sure enough: in September 2022 a smooth report of the demise of “the German version of Paypal” appeared on Netflix: Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard 2022 . This is our review of t...

The pursuit of greater sustainability will transform many companies in the coming decades. Regulations have come into place to force businesses around the world to change their behaviour. Most of us are well aware that mitigating climate change and the depletion of the Earth’s resources is of the utmost importance for ourselves and for future generations. But acting on it is something else. ...

The lightning-fast substitution of public money for private money, and the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies, have raised concerns about financial stability worldwide. Given that cash in Sweden is fast becoming something of a tourist attraction, it’s not surprising that Sweden is leading the way in Europe with the e-krona project. Already in 2017, the Swedish Riksbank started a study on ho...

Central banks worldwide have to make many choices during the design and implementation of digital central bank money (CBDCs). It must be prevented that large amounts are transferred simultaneously from private to public money, which can lead to self-fulfilling effects and financial instability. A study by the US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research suggests that these risks of CBDCs may be smal...

Nearly two and a half years ago, the Dutch Minister of Finance launched the so called FinTech action plan to let FinTech companies grow faster and give opportunities to new companies. According to the plan, The Netherlands´ strong points are its digital infrastructure, attractive culture, English language, central location and high quality of supervision. The so-called FinTech census showed t...

ING, NXP and Samsung have developed a method that allows smartphone users to pay among themselves via ultra-wideband. According to the parties, the method called “NEAR” is the first “peer-to-peer payment application” where users pay by holding the phone close to each other. Users therefore do not have to look up a username, e-mail address or telephone number first. In this episode of Insights, we...

Most Dutch people will hardly notice it, but the new debit card that they will receive in the coming years has a new brand logo. V PAY and Maestro cards are being replaced by Visa Debit and Debit Mastercard cards. In this episode of Connective Payments Insights, we explain the changes and benefits for consumers and merchants, both online and in physical shops, and the strategic choices for issuers...