Seven EU Member States - Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain - said, on Tuesday 9 November, that the European Payments Initiative (EPI), a private initiative launched in July 2020 (see EUROPE 12520/3), would help provide secure and innovative payment solutions and strengthen the EU’s strategic autonomy in an increasingly paperless market.
Noting that payments services remain “fragmented“ in the EU along national borders and suffer from a lack of interoperability, they state that they “firmly believe that time has come to build a genuine ‘Europe of payments’” by removing unnecessary regulatory barriers to stimulate competition in the payments market. They call on stakeholders to work to involve more Member States and promise to explore the possibility of converging the work of the EPI with other areas such as “electronic identification and central bank digital currencies”.
“With this initiative, Europe will step up its digital game. (...) The European Payments Initiative is a very promising approach for modern payment solutions for European citizens and companies”, said the German State Secretary for Finance, Jörg Kukies, in a statement.
See the statement: https://bit.ly/3H8Bd6S (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)