Brussels, 04/02/2000 (Agence Europe) - The move to the euro did not go hand in hand with the advent of an "area of single payment" in the European Union. Transferring money from one EU State t another is expensive and takes time. More than internal payments within a country, especially if it is a question of small amounts. For five years now, costs invoiced for cross-border payments have dropped but they still vary, for a payment of 100 euro, between 5 and 20 euro, whereas a national payment of the same amount is general invoiced at less than a euro.
Given this observation, the European Commission published a Communication on Friday to the European Parliament and Council on retail payments in the internal market. It demands that improvements be made to the infrastructures that transfer the payments which are well behind national electronic payments. It also calls for: a) the disappearance of differences in commissions levied depending on whether a payment card is used nationally or cross-border; b) greater transparency in information supplied to the holders of these cards. The Commission will permanently monitor the cost invoiced for cross-border payments and present the results of its monitoring on the Internet every six months.
"The entry into affect of the cross-border credit transfer directive is already acting as an incentive for banks to accelerate such transfers and to improve their service to customers, but banks have to do more, in particular by making cross-frontier transfer systems as efficient as those for domestic transfers", commented Frits Bolkestein, European Commissioner responsible for the internal market. The directive provides for banks ensuring the transfer of cross-border payments within six days, clearly informing their clients of the tariffs practised and invoicing the whole cost of the transfer to the person having transferred the money. The deadline for its transposition into national legislation was set at 14 August 1999 but Belgium, Greece, Italy and Portugal have not yet done so. The commission has initiated infringement procedures against them.
With the new Communication, the Commission sets out a kind of timetable for the next stages, comprising: immediate implementation of the aforementioned directive; presentation by banks, by September, of proposals on the establishment on efficient international connections; organisation of a round table in the autumn to discuss the different options; electronic purses should be able to be used beyond national borders by 1 January 2002.
The Commission is not ruling out the possibility of reducing the maximum time limit for execution now applicable to cross-border payments.
The full text of the new communication is available on the European Commission's Internet site: http: //europa.eu.int/comm/dg15.