Tuesday, July 7, 2020

The arrival of the European rival of Visa and Master Card is clarified

Twenty European banks want to create a pan-European payment system to compete with the two American giants Visa and Mastercard. The initiative aims to ensure the sovereignty of payments in Europe.

The European initiative to short-circuit Visa and MasterCard is starting to take shape. According to information from Les Echos, the official launch of the European interbank EPI project could take place this week, and most certainly on July 2.

This initiative, revealed last November, aims to manage all dematerialized forms of payments and therefore do without the two American players, essential today. Among the 20 European financial institutions involved, all the major French banks are present, as are Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank and Santander.

Political project senior security benefits
In this context, a common structure must be created to allow the implementation of the new system, which will replace national systems such as the grouping of CB Bank Cards in France and its European equivalents.

But beyond the financial aspect, this project is above all political. At the origin of this initiative, "positive injunctions, during 2017, came from the European Central Bank (ECB) which, worried about the sovereignty of payments, explained that it would welcome seize the subject ", told AFP on condition of anonymity a French banking source close to the matter.

"It will indeed install the new brand"
"This project will require a lot of technological investment but also communication" explains to Les Echos  a banker participating in the project. "It will indeed be necessary to install the new brand, so that it is as familiar to consumers as Visa or MasterCard". Nothing could be simpler, but Europe seems to be giving itself the means to get there: the European Commission, like the ECB and governments seem to be on the same wavelength.

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